European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions and Genres [1st ed.] 9783030334352, 9783030334369

Citation preview

Ingrid Lewis Laura Canning

EUROPEAN CINEMA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Discourses, Directions and Genres

European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century “Two decades into the twenty-first century, it is time to take a look at the recent cinema of Europe, and bring it into the curriculum. And this is what the book does: it presents and analyses the cinema of the new Europe, from riveting migrant documentaries set in the Mediterranean (Francesco Rossi’s Fire at Sea) to contemplative woman’s cinema from small peripheral countries (Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg). A true constellation of riveting topics and essays written by authors who represent Europe’s true diversity: East and West, North and South.” —Dina Iordanova, Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures, University of St Andrews, Scotland “This broad-ranging edited volume provides a much needed resource for film students as it deftly approaches the way conventional Western filmic traditions connect with emerging Eastern and Central European traditions. The well-structured chapters paint a rich tapestry of an evolving European cinema and speak to new modes of national identity. Drawing on a rich tradition of film scholarship, this book provides a timely geographical and critical historical map for decoding European cinema.” —Pat Brereton, Professor of Film Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland “European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Discourses, Directions and Genres uniquely places Eastern European cinema in co-equal dialogue with Western European cinema, addressing a gap in current studies. The chapters assembled by Lewis and Canning broach highly contemporary concerns in scholarship of Europe and its cinemas, including migration, ecocriticism, disability studies, biopolitics, as well as auteurship and genre. This is a comprehensive and accessible collection.” —Maria Flood, Lecturer in Film Studies, Keele University, UK “Contemporary European cinema is extremely diverse and engages with some of the most relevant issues of modern day life, not least the future of the continent. Responding to intensified scholarly research activity of the past few years, European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century sums up state of the art recent discourses while delivering new insights. Clearly structured and directly addressing lecturers’ needs, this book is a welcome and helpful contribution.” —Claus Tieber, Lecturer in Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Austria “This is a timely volume that makes two interventions: it brings together a range of international scholars who cover film cultures from Central and Eastern Europe, and it offers a refreshing take on art and popular cinema that attests to the heterogeneity of European film in the twenty-first century. Merging the close reading of recent films with industry analysis, among other methods, the volume engages with topical debates in European film studies as it addresses questions of gender, migration, and eco-cinema while also furthering our understanding of transnational authorship, small-nation filmmaking, peripheral cultural production, and genre cinema in a pan-European context. This collection will therefore be a useful resource for scholars and students alike.” —Jaap Verheul, Lecturer in Film Studies Education, King’s College London, UK

Ingrid Lewis  •  Laura Canning Editors

European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century Discourses, Directions and Genres

Editors Ingrid Lewis Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music Dundalk Institute of Technology Dundalk, Ireland

Laura Canning School of Film & Television Falmouth University Penryn, Cornwall, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-33435-2    ISBN 978-3-030-33436-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Geber86, Getty Images Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Padraig, my wonderful husband, soulmate and friend. To Cristina, the best sister I could ever wish for. Ingrid Lewis In memory of my beautiful boy Eric. I treasure every too-brief moment we had. For Ruan, light and joy of my life. Laura Canning

Acknowledgements

This book was inspired by our students and written for them. Being a teacher is a wonderful calling and a great responsibility at the same time. We would thus like to thank all our students for inspiring both our research and work in the classroom, for helping us to become, day by day, better teachers. Moreover, we feel privileged to belong to two fantastic departments at Dundalk Institute of Technology and Falmouth University. Our gratitude goes towards our employers and colleagues, all marvellous people with whom we are lucky enough to share the daily joys and challenges of our professional journeys. Huge thanks to the fantastic staff and students of the Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music, DkIT, especially Dr. Gerard (Bob) McKiernan and Dr. Adèle Commins. Major thanks to all students and staff at the unique and inspiring School of Film & Television (SoFT) at Falmouth University and, in particular, to Dr. Kingsley Marshall and Dr. Neil Fox. We are very grateful to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb and Emily Wood, for their continuous enthusiasm for and support towards this edited collection. Special thanks to our contributors who patiently and promptly engaged with our many sets of reviews and comments to their chapters. Finally, our deepest gratitude goes towards our families. Ingrid would like to thank her beloved mom, sister and niece: nothing of all this would be possible without your steadfast love and support. Va˘ iubesc mult. To my dad in heaven: miss you so much every day. I hope you are proud of me. To my amazing husband and extended Irish family, I am extremely grateful for your wholehearted love and affection. Grá agus gean ó chroí daoibh. Laura thanks, above all, those who have shown so much love and solidarity in the waning months of 2019. The sudden death of Eric Starr—my beloved partner, fiancé, best friend and devoted father of our son Ruan as well as his daughter Aoife—in the final days of editing this collection, just months before our wedding, has been a heartbreaking and terrible blow which I could not have survived without you. My family, friends in Ireland and Cornwall, Eric’s family, colleagues, publishers and the incredibly supportive and compassionate Ingrid: thank you all, from my heart. vii

Contents

1 Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema  1 Ingrid Lewis and Laura Canning Part I Discourses  13 2 Documenting Difference: Migration and Identity in European Documentaries 15 Adam Vaughan 3 Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness and Hybridity in Scottish Cinema 33 Emily Torricelli 4 Questioning the ‘Normality Drama’: The Representation of Disability in Contemporary European Films 51 Eleanor Andrews 5 Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Cinema: From Nature Appreciation to Social Conformism 69 Pietari Kääpä 6 The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in Holocaust Cinema 87 Ingrid Lewis 7 An Ordinary Warrior and His Inevitable Defeat: Representation in Post-Yugoslav Cinema109 Dino Murtic

ix

x 

Contents

Part II Directions 127 8 The New/Old Patriarchal Auteurism: Manoel de Oliveira, the Male Gaze and Women’s Representation129 Ingrid Lewis and Irena Sever Globan 9 The Latest European New Wave: Cinematic Realism and Everyday Aesthetics in Romanian Cinema149 Doru Pop 10 Between Transnational and Local in European Cinema: Regional Resemblances in Hungarian and Romanian Films167 Andrea Virginás 11 Crossing Borders: Investigating the International Appeal of European Films187 Huw D. Jones 12 Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European Filmmaking: Greece and Scandinavia in Focus207 Olga Kolokytha 13 Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean: The International and Transnational in Irish Cinema227 Maria O’Brien and Laura Canning Part III Genres 247 14 On the Eve of the Journey: The New European Road Movie249 Laura Rascaroli 15 German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’: Wildly Successful and a Lot Funnier than You Think263 Jill E. Twark 16 On the Ambiguous Charm of Film Noir: Elle and the New Type of Woman281 Begoña Gutiérrez-Martínez and Josep Pedro

 Contents 

xi

17 Dystopia Redux: Science Fiction Cinema and Biopolitics299 Mariano Paz 18 Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of Production317 Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos Index335

Notes on Contributors

Eleanor Andrews  is retired Senior Lecturer in Italian and Film Studies from the University of Wolverhampton, UK.  She specialised in Italian Cinema, in particular the works of directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Federico Fellini and Nanni Moretti, as well as Neo-Realism and the Spaghetti Western. She also taught French cinema, including poetic realism and the Nouvelle Vague. Her book on Moretti’s use of narrative space (Place, Setting, Perspective) was published in 2014. She is co-editor of Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door (2015). Her research interests include the Holocaust as well as myth and the fairy tale. Laura  Canning  is Senior Lecturer in Film and Course Leader on the BA (Hons) Film at the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, UK. She holds a PhD from the School of Communications, Dublin City University (2013) and primarily writes on Irish cinema, women filmmakers and genre. Her most recent work includes contributions on ‘Smart’ teen film in Rethinking Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema, eds. Silvia Dibeltulo and Ciara Barrett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and on Irish women filmmakers in Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers, ed. Susan Liddy (Cork University Press, 2020). Begoña  Gutiérrez-Martínez holds a PhD in Theory, Analysis and Cinematographic Documentation (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, UCM, Spain). She collaborates with the research group Analysis of Audiovisual Texts (ATAD, UCM), and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin (Radio-Television-Film Department). Her articles about television, cinema and culture have been published in Investigaciones Feministas, Trama & Fondo, EU-topías, Jazz Research Journal, and in the volumes Creaciones Audiovisuales Actuales, ¿Qué es el cine? and Entender el Artivismo. She has taught Narrative Cinema and Film Analysis (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), as well as Political Communication (CES Next, Universitat de Lleida).

xiii

xiv 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Huw D. Jones  is Lecturer in Film at the University of Southampton, UK. He previously worked at the University of York as a postdoctoral research associate on the ‘Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens’ (MeCETES) project (www.mecetes.co.uk), an international project on the transnational production, distribution and audience reception of European film and television drama. His articles have appeared in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, Transnational Cinemas, Comunicazioni Sociali, Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Cultural Trends. He also edited the book The Media in Europe’s Small Nations (2014). Pietari  Kääpä  is Associate Professor in Media and Communications in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. His work on transnational cinema has appeared in many journals and books, and they include Transnational Ecocinemas: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (with Tommy Gustafsson, 2013), Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas (2014), Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Culture in the Global Marketplace (with Gustafsson) and Environmental Management of the Media: Policy, Industry, Practice (2018). He is writing The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences (Bloomsbury, 2020) with Gustafsson. Olga Kolokytha  is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Vienna, researching on cultural policy. Before joining academia, she worked for more than a decade as a cultural projects manager and consultant around Europe. In December 2016, she received the Best Publication Award for the years 2013–2015 from the University of Music and the Performing Arts of Vienna. In 2018, she was among the key experts invited by the European Commission to consult on the future of the European Agenda for Culture. Ingrid Lewis  is Lecturer in Film Studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland, where she teaches modules on European Cinema, Holocaust Film and Popular Culture, Film Theory and World Cinema. She holds a PhD from the School of Communications, Dublin City University (2015) and has taught within the discipline of Film Studies at universities in Ireland, Croatia and Italy. She has been granted fellowships at Royal Holloway, University of London (UK, 2016) and Northwestern University (United States, 2015). Ingrid Lewis is author of the book Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Dino Murtic  teaches research and critical literacy at the University of South Australia. His book, Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Towards a Cosmopolitan Imagining (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), offered both a homage to the cinematic and cultural history of former Yugoslavia and a critical contextual overview of the political, aesthetic and ethical principles embedded in post-­Yugoslav film.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xv

Maria  O’Brien submitted her PhD thesis ‘A Political Economy of Tax Expenditures for the Audiovisual Industries in Ireland: A cultural policy research perspective on Section 481’ in the School of Communications, Dublin City University in October 2019. Her research interests include state aid policy, cultural industries policy for film and videogames and media law issues. She holds an MA in Screen Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MLitt from Trinity College Dublin. She worked as a lawyer in Dublin and London before entering academia and lectures in Media Law in the School of Communications, DCU.  She is co-founder and co-organizer of the annual East Asia Film Festival Ireland. Mariano Paz  is Lecturer in Spanish at the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick, Ireland, where he is also assistant director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies. His doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Manchester, was focused on the links between dystopia and science fiction in contemporary film. His articles on Hispanic cinemas have appeared in many books and journals. Josep  Pedro is Postdoctoral Researcher Juan de la Cierva-Formación at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M, FJC2018-036151-I). He is a member of the research group Audiovisual Diversity at UC3M, and he collaborates with the research group Semiotics, Communication and Culture at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). He holds a PhD in Journalism (UCM), and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and at Birmingham City University. He has published articles in journals such as Atlantic Studies, Jazz Research Journal, Signa and EU-topías, and has written chapters in the volumes Talking Back to Globalization, Jazz and Totalitarianism and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. Doru Pop  is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. In the United States, he has taught courses at Bard College and Columbus State University. He has authored several books on visual culture, media, and politics and essays on film studies. His most recent publications are The Age of Promiscuity: Narrative and Mythological Meme Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture (2018) and Romanian New Wave Cinema: An Introduction (2014). Laura Rascaroli  is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. Her interests span art film, modernism and postmodernism, geopolitics, nonfiction, first-person cinema and the essay film. She is the author of several monographs, including How the Essay Film Thinks (2017), The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (2009) and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (with Ewa Mazierska, 2006), and editor of collections including Antonioni: Centenary Essays (with John David Rhodes, 2011) and the forthcoming Expanding Cinema: Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art (with Jill Murphy). She is general editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.

xvi 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Vicente  Rodríguez  Ortega  is Senior Lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) and member of the Television-Cinema: Memory, Representation and Industry (TECMERIN) research group. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Television & New Media, NESCUS: European Journal of Media Studies and New Media & Society. He has also written chapters in books such as A Companion to Spanish Cinema, A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar and Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television. His research interests include the relationship between media representations and Spain’s history, cinema and digital technology and film genres. Rubén  Romero  Santos  is a PhD researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) and member of the TECMERIN research group. He has contributed to World Film Locations: Barcelona (2013), Ficcionando en el siglo XXI: La ficción televisiva en España (2016) and Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television (2017). He has been working as a film and television journalist for almost two decades. He started his career at the counterculture publication Ajoblanco from where he jumped to editor-in-chief of the film magazine Cinemanía. He combines his academic work with collaborations in magazines like Rolling Stone, SModa/El País or Icon/El País and television platforms such as Canal +. Irena Sever Globan  is Lecturer at the Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb, where she teaches a variety of modules on media studies and film. She holds a PhD in Communications from the Salesian University in Rome, Italy, (2011) with a thesis on women, religion and film. Her work on the representation of women in the media has appeared in many publications, and she has recently co-authored the monograph Marija Magdalena: Od Isusove učenice do filmske bludnice (with Jadranka Rebeka Anić, 2018). Emily Torricelli  is an independent scholar and adjunct instructor based in the United States. She holds a PhD in Theatre, Film and Television from the University of York (2017). Her areas of research interest include trans/ national cinemas, identity politics and labelling, reception theory and British screen studies. She also holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies from the University of Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from Boston University. She has been published in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media and Frames Cinema Journal. Jill E. Twark  is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University in North Carolina, USA. Her work on twentieth- and early twenty-first-century German literature and culture has appeared in many books and journals. After the monograph Humor, Satire, and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s and the edited volume Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media, she shifted her focus to social justice dilemmas in Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture,

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xvii

co-edited with Axel Hildebrandt. She is editing a book on German responses to historical economic crises and writing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century humour in the United States and Europe. Adam  Vaughan  teaches in the School of Media, Arts and Technology at Solent University and in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He holds a PhD from the University of Southampton (2018). His research interests include performance and identity in documentary film and LGBTQ+ cinema. He is working on the monograph from his PhD thesis titled Performative Identity in Contemporary Biographical Documentary and has forthcoming chapters in edited collections on performative activism in the film Pride (2014) and the historical biopics of Derek Jarman. Andrea Virginás  is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj, Romania, with research interests in mainstream cinema cultures and small national cinemas. She is the author of Post/Modern Crime: From Agatha Christie to Palahniuk, from Film Noir to Memento (2011) and editor of The Use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories (2016). Her articles have appeared in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, European Journal of English Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of European Studies and in the volumes Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories (2017) and New Romanian Cinema (2019).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Samuele’s desire to ‘see’ as symbolism for audiences acknowledging the migrant crisis in Fire at Sea27 Rosi’s mediated documentary gaze of the migrant ‘other’ in Fire at Sea29 The Chutney Queens’ performance costumes in Nina’s Heavenly Delights46 Written ingredients dissolve into curry in Nina’s Heavenly Delights47 Driss handing over the mobile phone in Untouchable57 The cramped bathroom in the Banlieue58 Rare Exports undermines the cultural imagery of Santa Claus in its critique of global consumerism 71 An avalanche terrifies an international group of tourists and fragments the façade of their superficial neoliberal safety net 81 Rebecca Cohen’s monologue in front of a funerary urn for the Holocaust victims of Macedonia in Darko Mitrevski’s The Third Half (2012) 89 The “vicarious witness” experience in female-directed films. (Source: The author) 96 Tomasz’s ghost from the past, dressed in a striped uniform, invades Hannah’s present in Anna Justice’s Remembrance (2011) 99 The encounter between Myriam and Oskar, symbolising the dichotomy between memory and history, in Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003) 104 The image of Isaac and Angélica which resembles the famous paintings of Marc Chagall 138 Henri’s discussion with the barman is artistically framed by a mirror in Belle Toujours143 Mr. Lăzărescu’s bedroom provides a naturalistic mise en scène where authenticity accentuates the cinematographic realism. (Courtesy of Mandragora) 160 This ‘everyday life’ narrative is driven by the anti-heroic nature of Mr. Lăzărescu and his apparent lack of traits allows a criticism of large representation paradigms. (Courtesy of Mandragora) 162 xix

xx 

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 The ‘ethical close-up’ in Son of Saul180 Fig. 10.2 The anti-racist triptych of Aferim!181 Fig. 11.1 British national symbols in Skyfall196 Fig. 11.2 Scottish cultural references in The Angels’ Share197 Fig. 12.1 Marina and Bella, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films) 218 Fig. 12.2 Marina and her father, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films) 220 Fig. 13.1 Racially diverse streets in Brooklyn (2015) are a backdrop to interrogations of Irishness in (white) America 240 Fig. 13.2 Brooklyn (2015) may be set in New York, but Eilis’s sights are more limited, as “All the skyscrapers are across the river” 241 Fig. 15.1 Winfried, posing as Toni Erdmann, handcuffed to Ines 271 Fig. 15.2 Zeki threatens to wake a Neonazi as his students look on 274 Fig. 16.1 An unknown masked male rapes Elle’s female protagonist, violently interrupting the calm suburban atmosphere of her bourgeois neighbourhood 291 Fig. 16.2 In Elle, immersed in a sadomasochistic relationship with her rapist, Michèle hugs her attacker while enjoying sexual intercourse on the hot basement’s floor 294 Fig. 17.1 Robert is subjected to a painful punishment for having masturbated. The Lobster (2015) 311 Fig. 17.2 A Bactrian camel walks by in the woods as a group of Loners spy on David. The Lobster (2015) 311 Fig. 18.1 The Spanish poster for The Orphanage328 Fig. 18.2 The international poster for The Orphanage329

List of Tables

Table 6.1 Holocaust films directed or co-directed by women Table 10.1 The model of small national cinemas Table 10.2 Top five Hungarian films in terms of audience numbers in the early 2010s Table 10.3 Top five Romanian films in terms of audience numbers in the early 2010s Table 10.4 Hungarian box-office growth: audience numbers of the most-viewed domestic releases for 2016–2017 Table 10.5 Romanian box-office growth: audience numbers of the most-­viewed domestic releases for 2016 Table 10.6 Aferim! premier week in Romanian cinemas (9–15 March 2015) Table 10.7 Son of Saul premier week in Hungarian cinemas (11–17 June 2015) Table 11.1 Successful NNE films released in Europe in 2012 Table 11.2 Key cultural and industrial characteristics of NNE films by category of film

94 171 172 172 173 173 176 176 193 194

xxi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Identity of European Cinema Ingrid Lewis and Laura Canning

What is contemporary European cinema? Given the indisputable richness of Europe, comprising a variety of languages, cultures, nationalities, aesthetic canons, and modes of production, can we still discuss European cinema as a unitary concept? If so, how can we approach a category that clearly rejects rigid definitions and classifications? And how do Western filmic traditions go together with the ones emerging from Eastern and Central Europe? What are their similarities and contradictions? What are the particularities of film production at the peripheries of Europe, and how do economic contexts impact on issues of style and aesthetics? Moreover, does European cinema already exist as a transnational phenomenon and not just as the sum of its national cinemas? How are landmark historical events such as the Holocaust, the Yugoslav Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and subsequent collapse of communism in many Central and Eastern European nations, depicted in European cinema? What role does the cinematic medium play in reinforcing and challenging dominant discourses about the past in various countries? How does the changing nature of European identity, due both to historical events and contemporary social realities, such as increasing migration and growing diasporas, affect the essence of European cinema itself? This collection effectively addresses the key questions above which are very much at the heart of ongoing critical debates in European film studies. In doing so, it applies some of the most pressing inquiries in contemporary

I. Lewis (*) Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] L. Canning School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, Penryn, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_1

1

2 

I. LEWIS AND L. CANNING

European cinema to a wide-ranging and diverse selection of twenty-first-­ century films from all corners of Europe. The book’s distinctive features are its strong focus on the European cinematic output of the twenty-first century, while still retaining a sense of inheritances from the last century, and its significant inclusion of the often-neglected cinemas of Central and Eastern Europe. However, in order to fully grasp the contribution and potential impact of this collection, one needs to understand the impetus and pedagogical context from which this book emerges. This edited collection places the students and their needs at the centre of its efforts. It also responds to an urgent need for an accessible and comprehensive collection that can introduce students to the main concepts, discourses, directions, and genres of twenty-first-century European film. Moreover, it builds on existing studies on European cinema, while moving further towards acknowledging recent patterns and trends of production and representation throughout the continent. These features are complemented by an accessible and student-friendly structure in which each chapter discusses significant topics, explains their context, and provides definitions of key terms. Each chapter also encourages critical thinking by providing a case study that summarises and applies the theoretical content and a set of reflective questions designed to help students develop their contextual and critical understanding even further. Modules on European cinema have become increasingly popular in university curricula, both in European countries and overseas. However, knowledge on the topic is often fragmented across a variety of studies, or centred around specific national cinemas, which can act as a hindrance in discerning key trends and assimilating the complexities of European film. Two key books that aim for a more general approach on European cinema (Galt 2006; Wood 2007) are indispensable class resources; yet they make little reference to highly successful films from Eastern Europe. In one sense, this apparent ‘lack’ illustrates both the value of this new volume and the immense complexity of the task at hand in attempting to synthesise any approach to a continent’s cinematic output: industry and representation transform swiftly, and a movement or tendency which may be merely nascent at one moment can bloom fully in another. In the (more than a) decade that has passed since the publication of Mary Wood’s seminal monograph, European cinema has significantly changed and evolved, and we see that the challenge of charting the field also shows us one of its strengths; it is disinclined to stay ‘fixed’ for long. Three recent studies acknowledge some of these changes: Mariana Liz’s (2016) monograph discusses the images of Europe emerging from contemporary cinema, Bondebjerg et al.’s (2015) edited volume takes a more production-­ related emphasis, while Harrod et  al.’s (2014) comprehensive collection of essays highlights the ‘European’ label as a marketing tool in the increasingly transnational filmmaking emerging from Europe. Unfortunately, as with previous studies, the balance between the West and the East is significantly tilted towards the former. This collection builds on extant scholarship in order to

1  INTRODUCTION: THE IDENTITY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA 

3

more accurately map the terrain and to bridge some of the gaps only identified through the valuable work of others. For example, Dina Iordanova (2003) has, in her highly significant work, already drawn attention to the peripheral position assigned to Central-Eastern films and national industries in the overall scholarship on European cinema. As Iordanova (2003: 1) tellingly states, “the concept of European cinema is still more or less synonymous with West European film-making, and the teaching of European cinema barely covers East Central European traditions”. This monograph therefore applies a ‘transversal’ approach to European film, bringing together the East and the West, while providing a comprehensive picture of key trends, aesthetics, genres, national identities, and transnational concerns. Significantly, the inclusive approach adopted by this volume highlights both the similarities and the discrepancies between national cinemas throughout Europe. From a cinematic point of view, the acknowledgement of a wide variety of perspectives enables us to explore the mechanisms that foreground or, on the contrary, overshadow certain cultural, historical, and political discourses in Western versus Eastern Europe. Such a comprehensive outlook, which pays tribute to filmic productions from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, represents one of the crucial features of this collection and would have not been possible without two editors of diverse cultural and professional backgrounds. Ingrid Lewis was born and raised in Romania, thus having an acute awareness of the regional cinemas of Eastern Europe and broader societal discourses common to post-communist countries. Laura Canning grew up and studied in Ireland, thus having an in-depth understanding of the practices and values that impact on Western European film. Furthermore, Ingrid’s teaching and research activities revolve around non-English-language films and are concerned with highlighting discourses and representations in (non-Western) European cinema, where Laura’s expertise centres on Western, mainstream, English-­ language films, with a strong interest in issues of genre, production, and industry. Thus, Ingrid’s and Laura’s varied cultural backgrounds and areas of specialism enhance and strengthen the quality of this book, offering a heterogeneous variety of perspectives. This further reconfirms Galt’s (2006: 4–6) statement on the importance of a filmic and written discourse that not only addresses the ‘changing spaces’ of Europe but also emerges from these very own spaces. Over the past couple of decades, various leading scholars such as Jill Forbes and Sarah Street (2000), Mike Wayne (2002), Dina Iordanova (2003), Elizabeth Ezra (2004a), Wendy Everett (2005a), Thomas Elsaesser (2005), Rosalind Galt (2006), Luisa Rivi (2007), Mary Wood (2007), and Mariana Liz (2016), among others, have published seminal monographs on European cinema considered from different perspectives. One issue that resurfaces in most of these studies is the impossibility of defining and delimiting European cinema. Everett (2005a: 9) highlights the misconceptions behind equating Europe with the European Union (EU) in terms of cinema. On the contrary, European

4 

I. LEWIS AND L. CANNING

cinema needs to be an inclusive area of study that encompasses all countries from West to East and North to South of Europe and everything in between. As Rosalind Galt (2006: 5) argues, post-Berlin Wall cinema “maps the spaces of Europe ‘today’, speaking both of and from the changing spaces of the continent”. Thus, as an academic area, any conception of European cinema needs to be empowering, inviting all countries to be represented but also allowing nationalities to re-present themselves, enriching the scholarly canon with their own voices and perspectives. Given that, from a geographical point of view, Europe is a mixture of languages, cultures, traditions, film schools, cinematic aesthetics, and industry practices, one needs to acknowledge diversity and difference as the quintessence of European cinema. Firstly, this book celebrates the complex identity of European cinema as a sum of national cinemas, each the product of their own particular realities. Every national film industry, whether emerging or well-­ established, auteur-centred or commercial, modern or traditional, is not only different from others but often also a complex reality in itself. Reflecting this diversity, for example, those countries at the margins of Europe such as Greece and Ireland face additional challenges (and perhaps opportunities) in the processes of film production as explained in Chaps. 12 and 13, respectively. Also, as Luisa Rivi (2007: 4) acknowledges, cinema has played a pivotal role in articulating and reinforcing ideas of nationhood. A case in point in this book is contained in Chap. 15, which discusses Germany as an example of commercial filmmaking that draws on national history, politics, and collective memory in its production of highly successful comedies catering to popular tastes. This chapter also reinforces Wood’s (2007: xxi) claim that the popularity of genre films in their own countries confirms that audiences “still prefer stories in their own voices”. Secondly, in the same vein as many scholars, this collection acknowledges that European cinema is increasingly a post-national, pan-European, and transnational reality. According to Rosalind Galt (2006: 6–7), even by the 1980s and 1990s, the landscape of the film industry in Europe was characterised by an increased volume of co-productions coupled with an upsurge in television-­ funded films. Importantly, Rivi (2007: 4–9) highlights that co-productions are “the most fertile terrain for redefining European identity” and attends  to the possibility that nowadays these are more culturally than financially motivated compared to the past. In a similar vein, Wood (2007: xxi) describes co-­ productions and partnerships with national and privatised television networks as “life-savers for the European film industries”. These trends already identified by scholars in late twentieth-century European cinema are present, to a much greater extent, into the twenty-first century as our book explains, particularly in Chap. 18, which considers the significance of the liberalisation of the television marketplace in the emergence of Spanish horror. The significance of contemporary political-economic conditions,1 seen for example in the 2008 economic crash and its impact on funding—particularly in

1  INTRODUCTION: THE IDENTITY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA 

5

the hardest-hit peripheral countries, Ireland and Greece—also points to an increasingly varied mixture of often highly dynamic strategies facilitating production, from national film policy, to EU funding, to formal and informal regional, national, and international practices of cooperation. Some of these may be viewed with caution in terms of their possible impact on the nature of European cinema, if we acknowledge that “different ways of organizing and financing communications have implications for the range and nature of media content, and the ways in which these are consumed and used” (Hardy 2014: 7). For those European countries which are part of the EU, certain mechanisms are in place, within wider audiovisual policy, to foster film as an element of the audiovisual industries. With the contemporary field marked by fragmentation of the market, where audiovisual culture has been seen in the past (albeit sometimes problematically, as per Collins 1994, and Shore 2006) as a way of fostering a common European heritage, the perspective has broadly shifted to a more market-oriented policy of simultaneously advancing unity and diversity, and taking the view that the promotion of national industries enables protection of cultural diversity. Film in twenty-first-century Europe exhibits many of the complexities of production and funding seen worldwide. The political economy of twenty-­ first-­century film production is marked by changes brought about by global recession and by the shift to the digital. In general, the recession has caused difficulties in accessing funding for independent filmmaking, in that the ‘pre-­ sales’ approach has reduced significantly (for a case study on Ireland’s experience, see Olsberg SPI 2017), and in that there is a trend for favouring production of ‘known quantities’, such as franchises and adaptations. Digitalisation has wrought changes to the distribution landscape, thus reducing the previously valuable DVD sales market, and with the increase in online streaming further disrupting the production and distribution methods traditionally used within the film industry—a matter Olga Kolokytha discusses in more detail in her reflection on the specific contexts of peripheral (Greek and Scandinavian) production in Chap. 12. Thirdly, this collection provides important insights into several key features that unify European cinema: its potential ‘otherness’ in terms of opposition to Hollywood, its inherent tensions between old versus new, and auteur versus commercial. According to Everett (2005a: 10), “European cinema is often defined by those characteristics that distinguish it from mainstream Hollywood”. As various chapters in this book suggest, the preoccupation with Hollywood remains at the heart of European cinema in terms of defining its identity. However, given the increasingly transnational context that characterises the twenty-first century, the reactions of national cinemas on the continent to Hollywood dominance have been increasingly varied and complex: from persistent rejection of its aesthetic canons as in the case of the Romanian New Wave (Chap. 9), to identifying strategic allegiances in and between the popular cinemas of small nations (Chap. 10), or instances in which this tension is nego-

6 

I. LEWIS AND L. CANNING

tiated by looking towards but also away from Hollywood (Chap. 13). There is a second dimension of otherness that needs to be discussed here and which reflects Loshitzky’s (2010: 10) beautifully phrased idea of European films being “unique sites of struggle over identity formation and meaning”. This is an ‘otherness from within’ that emerges as a powerful discourse in contemporary cinema as a result of growing migration and emerging diasporas across Europe to a much greater extent than in the pre-Berlin Wall period (Chaps. 2 and 3). The preoccupation with ‘otherness’ seen as a source of difference and threat is also present in discourses on disability, as Chap. 4 points out. This book acknowledges an unceasing process of defining notions of ‘national’ and ‘European’ that lies at the heart of many cinematic debates in twenty-first-­ century films. Moreover, it can be argued that European cinema is permeated by a certain nostalgia for the past, translated in an ongoing battle between its progressive and conservative features. Such pervasive nostalgia is evident in aesthetically reinvigorating ‘New Waves’ as explained in Chap. 9 or in more regressive processes reinforcing outdated representational paradigms, as pointed out in Chap. 8, discussing the recent auteur cinema of Manoel de Oliveira. However, this longing for the past is paralleled by trends in European cinema that fully embrace the reality of filmmaking in the twenty-first century, as explained above. Also, European film is inevitably linked with questions of auteurism, especially when thinking of the milestone movements that have marked its existence thus far, such as Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, New German Cinema, Dogme 95, and so on. One can clearly observe that these key movements do not belong solely to the ‘history’ of European cinema but impact on many of its contemporary filmmakers and the aesthetics and style of their newest films. Adding to this argument, some of the greatest auteurs that emerged in the early- to mid-stages of European cinema have continued to make successful films in the twenty-first century. It is not only the case of Manoel de Oliveira but also Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, to name just a few. However, as Wood (2007) points out, filmmakers—even those with the status of auteur—are increasingly aware of the commercial and production-­ related aspects of their films. As several chapters in this book have acknowledged, the twenty-first century brought an impressive influx of popular films, and the dichotomy between auteur and commercial cinema is breaking down. These constant dualities and tensions between old versus new, and auteur versus commercial, confirm European cinema as a highly dynamic and continuously changing reality marked by, as Elizabeth Ezra (2004b: 16) claims, its innovation and ability to reinvent  itself over decades. They also reinforce Everett’s (2005b: 33) argument that the identity of European cinema is “an ongoing process” and any attempt to define it must be therefore recognised as “temporary and unstable”. Part I features six chapters concerned with establishing dominant discourses that characterise the complex arena of today’s European cinema. That is, not

1  INTRODUCTION: THE IDENTITY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA 

7

only do their topics engage with trends in film, but they contribute variously— on subjects as diverse as the environment, immigration, our interpretation of ‘the national’, the acknowledgement of diversity including disability, gendered understandings of history, and how the envisioning/revisioning of war intervenes in discourses of nationalism—to our understanding of the practices through which cultures constitute and produce knowledge, and the inextricable relationship that knowledge has with the power dynamics underpinning society. Additionally, they do so in ways that foreground the transnationalisation of film production and consumption. Adam Vaughan in Chap. 2 interrogates how documentary films engage with and respond to issues of migration and diaspora. Using the case study of Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016), Vaughan explores the role of filmmakers in highlighting the plight of migrants fleeing their homes and examines the increasing ability of viewers to engage in media debates on migration through the use of social platforms. In her contribution on Scottish cinema, Emily Torricelli in Chap. 3 considers the way in which ‘Otherness’ complicates our notions of the national and examines both the historic othering of Scotland itself through cinema and the way in which Scottish identity is simultaneously Other and not-Other—particularly pertinent in the current context of potential EU fragmentation post-Brexit. She then goes on to examine the influence of diasporic cultures in the creation of hybrid Scottish identities, using Pratibha Parmar’s 2006 Nina’s Heavenly Delights to further unpack the place of race, religion, and sexuality in forming diasporic identity. In Chap. 4, focused on the ‘normality drama’, Eleanor Andrews questions the representation of disability in four recent European films, including The Sea Inside (2004), The Theory of Everything (2014), and Untouchable (2011), before examining The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) in more detail. Andrews discusses to what extent the ‘triumph over tragedy’ narrative is the norm in films of this type and considers the way in which they may emphasise the representation of normality over that of impairment. Chapter 5 by Pietari Kääpa outlines how Nordic countries, namely Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, are frequently viewed as some of the greenest in the world; yet their economies and politics are based on unsustainable and perhaps inequitable approaches. By focusing on four key representational themes in Nordic film cultures (landscape, environmentalism, urbanity, and resource politics), Kääpa addresses the ways in which Nordic cinema capitalises on the environment and the outwardly affirmative politics of these societies but effectively uses them in ways that showcase an approach to the environment that is fraught with contradictions. The two final chapters of Part I focus on gendered discourses in recent European cinema. Chapter 6 by Ingrid Lewis signals a representational shift in twenty-first-century Holocaust films towards restoring women’s voices and retelling women’s stories from their perspective. By discussing various films about the Holocaust released throughout Europe, Lewis contends that recent

8 

I. LEWIS AND L. CANNING

cinema creates valid premises for analysing the relationship between gender, memory, and representation. Finally, Chap. 7 by Dino Murtic aptly contends that post-Yugoslav cinema exhibits a predominantly anti-war stance. He claims that the ‘warrior’ stereotype prevailing in pre-Yugoslav cinematic imaginations has shifted towards discourses foregrounding a more nuanced figure, the ‘ordinary man’, who may be an unwilling participant, a martyr whose sacrifice is pointless, or an individual whose brutality is unleashed in service of nationalism(s). Murtic situates this approach in the context of both the cinematic history and evolution of post-Yugoslav film and the overall democratisation process of the Western Balkans. Part II brings together six critical perspectives on key developments and current directions—in industrial and structural practices which foreground the increasingly transnational character of European cinema, in formal and aesthetic tendencies, and in representation—that characterise the field since the beginning of the 2000s. Ingrid Lewis and Irena Sever Globan in Chap. 8 interrogate the way in which auteur cinema facilitates the persistence of antiquated, patriarchal representations of women even into the twenty-first century. In doing so, their chapter examines from a comparative perspective three films directed by Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira, namely Belle Toujours (2006), Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (2009), and The Strange Case of Angelica (2010). Their chapter argues that Oliveira’s female characters are particularly interesting—and controversial—since they challenge contemporary canons by locating the woman within the outdated virgin/whore dichotomy. The choice of Oliveira, whose career spanned from the silent era to 2015, is crucial to understanding how these rigid and archetypal images of women have been able to survive in more recent films. Following the thematic strand of auteur cinema, Chap. 9 by Doru Pop overviews Romanian cinema, considered to be the most recent addition to the Europe’s most influential movements in film history, known as the ‘New Waves’. His chapter compares the work of Romanian filmmakers with the stylistics of Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and other similar auteur-centred movements. Using the case study of Cristi Puiu’s film The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005), Pop’s chapter identifies the style and aesthetics of this highly successful movement, which has brought international acclaim to Romanian filmmakers over the past two decades. While Doru Pop analyses Romanian auteur cinema in terms of its style and visuals, Chap. 10 by Andrea Virginás foregrounds the commercial film industries of Eastern Europe. According to Virginás, in the post-1989 period, art-house/ highbrow, and possibly also midcult/middlebrow films in Hungarian and Romanian cinemas—in line with European art-house cinema in general—have explicitly imagined their functioning as situated the farthest possible from Hollywood-produced, globally distributed mainstream cinema. Meanwhile, lowbrow, popular domestic Hungarian and Romanian cinema has been mobilising on various levels—in terms of production organisation but also form and aesthetics—what she describes as a ‘meso-level’ combination of small national characteristics, European art-house allegiances, and Hollywood influences.

1  INTRODUCTION: THE IDENTITY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA 

9

Virginás develops her hypothesis based on two commercial films with the greatest domestic film audience numbers of their respective countries in 2015: Hungary’s Oscar-winning Son of Saul and Romania’s Berlin Silver Bear winner Aferim! The final three chapters of Part II focus explicitly on issues related to the transnational dimension of many European films. Drawing on a database of over 20,000 films released in Europe during the period 2005–2015, along with focus groups conducted with over 140 participants in 5 European countries, Huw Jones in Chap. 11 aims to determine why some European films travel better than others. Jones’ research casts important light on the mechanisms that enable films to travel across national and linguistic boundaries. His chapter reveals that while ‘quality signals’—for example, an established ‘auteur’, major awards, festival recognition, positive reviews—are crucial for securing the international distribution of European films, these are not necessarily the attributes audiences look for. Jones illustrates this point with a case study on the French comedy-drama Untouchable (2011), a film with almost universal appeal amongst the focus groups’ participants, despite having few obvious ‘quality signals’. Olga Kolokytha’s work (Chap. 12) on tendencies at the periphery demonstrates that increasingly globalised conditions of production are intimately linked with broader political and economic power dynamics relative to core and peripheral national cinemas within Europe. She identifies collaborative working practices designed to foster solidarity in the face of economic crisis and fragmented funding opportunities as significant to the emergence of the ‘Greek Weird Wave’ and selects as her case study Attenberg (2010), a film which displays many of these characteristics. In this chapter, too, she creates a strong sense of the contrast between the Greek experience of peripherality and regionality and Scandinavian policies designed specifically to foster regional production. This notion of peripheral specificity is also seen in O’Brien and Canning’s work in Chap. 13 on the way in which Irish cinema has, for a variety of historical, cultural, and industrial-economic reasons, looked away from a notion of common heritage with Europe and casts its gaze instead to America, albeit in a way that may to some extent challenge the view of Hollywood as exerting a one-way cultural domination over Europe, considering the possibility of a more ‘transnational’ exchange. It also foregrounds the particular nature of Ireland’s diasporic history and culture, examining the internationalised careers of some of Ireland’s emerging twenty-first-century filmmakers and in its case study of Irish emigration drama Brooklyn (2015). Part III scrutinises elements of genre and narrative in twenty-first-century European cinema, grouped under five thematic strands: road movie, comedy, neo-noir, science fiction, and horror. Chapter 14 by Laura Rascaroli focuses on three French-language films, namely Far (2001), Since Otar Left (2003), and Welcome (2009), which have the journey at the core of their narrative concerns. As Rascaroli explains, these films explore the theme of travel not as liberation but as tension—between places, identities, discourses, and psychological states. Rascaroli contends that in these films, the journey becomes the locus of the

10 

I. LEWIS AND L. CANNING

simultaneous manifestation and frustration of tensions that broadly belong to contemporary French and European society, and that have to do with the pressures created by borders and limits, immigration, cultural transformations, economic junctures, and political discourses. Jill Twark reflects on the major developments in German comedy and its—unexpected, in some quarters—dramatic rise in domestic and international popularity in the twenty-first century. Examining several of the major films within the genre, she interrogates their depiction of contemporary social problems and German history and considers the place of ‘Hitler humour’ as well as the transcultural comedies of Turkish German directors. Chapter 16 by Begoña Gutiérrez Martínez and Josep Pedro explores the genres of European film noir, neo-noir, and psychological thriller. In doing so, they theoretically engage with these cinematographic categories by focusing on the figure of the glamorous femme fatale and on the corresponding crisis of masculinity often associated with it. Taking as their case study the French, German, and Belgian co-production Elle (2016), Gutiérrez Martínez and Pedro claim that the film delivers a challenging and original representation of the twenty-first-century femme fatale. In Chap. 17, Mariano Paz discusses the rebirth of science fiction genre that has taken place in European cinemas since the early 2000s. As he argues, the twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of a significant corpus of science fiction films that includes elaborate works from a wide range of European nations, including Cargo (2009), Eva (2011), Ex Machina (2014), Wang’s Arrival (2011), and Timecrimes (2006). Taking as his central case study Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015), Paz discusses how the film deals with social fears and anxieties about the future of Europe through an exercise in contemporary dystopian imagination and argues that even when relying on sophisticated visual effects and CGI sequences that would not be out of place in Hollywood cinema, these films belong, by and large, to a more historically ‘European’ intellectual form of science fiction, centred on speculation and narrative. Finally, in Chap. 18, Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos explore the political-economic as well as textual contexts of Spanish horror, demonstrating how the 1990s wave of liberalisation and privatisation of television networks facilitated—or forced, depending on one’s perspective—television operators into a variety of complex engagements with film production and/or distribution. This chapter, too, signals the industrial importance of popular genre as both a way of articulating the specifically indigenous cultural preoccupations of a nation and a way of attempting to harness ‘internationalised’ genre attributes in order to negotiate increasingly globalised film markets in the institutional shadow of the Hollywood industry.

Note 1. With sincere thanks to Maria O’Brien for guidance and data in relation to EU funding and policy.

1  INTRODUCTION: THE IDENTITY OF EUROPEAN CINEMA 

11

References Bondebjerg, Ib, Eva Novrup Redvall, and Andrew Higson, eds. 2015. European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Collins, Richard. 1994. Broadcasting and Audio-Visual Policy in the European Single Market. London: John Libbey. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Everett, Wendy, ed. 2005a. European Identity in Cinema. 2nd ed. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2005b. Re-framing the Fingerprints: A Short Survey of European Film. In European Identity in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett, 2nd ed., 15–34. Bristol: Intellect. Ezra, Elizabeth, ed. 2004a. European Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004b. Introduction: A Brief History of Cinema in Europe. In European Cinema, ed. Elizabeth Ezra, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forbes, Jill, and Sarah Street. 2000. European Cinema: An Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Galt, Rosalind. 2006. Redrawing the Map: The New European Cinema. New  York: Columbia University Press. Hardy, Jonathan. 2014. Critical Political Economy of the Media: An Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Harrod, Mary, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina, eds. 2014. The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization. London: I. B. Tauris. Iordanova, Dina. 2003. Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. London: Wallflower Press. Liz, Mariana. 2016. Euro-Visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Olsberg SPI & Nordicity. 2017. Economic Analysis of the Audiovisual Sector in the Republic of Ireland. https://www.o-spi.co.uk/recent-reports/. Accessed 15 May 2019. Rivi, Luisa. 2007. European Cinema After 1989: Cultural Identity and National Production. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shore, Chris. 2006. In uno plures(?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe. Cultural Analysis 5: 7–26. Wayne, Mike. 2002. The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders, Diasporas. Bristol: Intellect. Wood, Mary P. 2007. Contemporary European Cinema. London: Hodder Arnold.

PART I

Discourses

CHAPTER 2

Documenting Difference: Migration and Identity in European Documentaries Adam Vaughan

Definitions Documentary Film Also known as ‘nonfiction film’ or ‘factual output’, a film text that typically presents a factual record of the ‘real’ world. Migration The movement of people from one location to another. This could be voluntary, such as an individual moving to a different country for economic reasons, or forced, such as the displacement of individuals as a result of the 2011 Arab Spring. Refugee A person who has been forced to leave their country due to war, poverty, persecution or natural disasters. MEDIA Part of the Creative Europe initiative, this sub-programme aims to facilitate European-inflected projects and introduce them to global film markets.

A. Vaughan (*) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_2

15

16 

A. VAUGHAN

Introduction Documentary film is arguably as old as cinema itself. When Auguste and Louis Lumière demonstrated their cinematograph on 28 December 1895 in Paris, the brothers not only conceived of cinema as we now know it, they also originated documentary’s desire to record the ‘real’. Later called ‘actualities’, these short films initially depicted ‘ordinary’ events, such as workers leaving a factory and a locomotive entering a station. In these early one-shot films, we can see the beginnings of what we now understand as documentary cinema: a treatment of a subject from reality; little or no use of fictional techniques, such as sets, actors or special effects; and the purpose of recording images from the world without distortion or bias. That said, one of the fascinating attributes of the nonfiction film form in the decades that followed is its flexibility and fluidity, often transformed by filmmakers to suit their particular needs at a particular time and in a specific place. Some of the most significant changes to documentary cinema have been introduced by European directors and producers—John Grierson’s social-minded films in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, Sergei Eisenstein’s blurring of fiction and nonfiction forms to represent Soviet Russia, cinema verité techniques in 1960s France—and these continue today. However, in the twenty-first century, a series of socio-political events, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, Brexit and the ongoing migrant crisis, have triggered a re-evaluation of what it means to be ‘European’. This chapter takes this question as a starting point and specifically analyses how documentary filmmakers have responded to the issue of migration and diaspora, in terms of both representation and the national implications this has for contemporary Europe. In what ways are documentary films especially suited to representing this challenge? Furthermore, what impact do smartphone video technology and social media platforms have on spectators’ ability to participate in these debates? However, before examining the status of European documentary film in the twenty-first century, it will be necessary to provide a brief overview of some of the key historical turning points for the form, in terms of filmmaking practice, cultural policy and the representation of migration.

The Migrant in Documentary: A Brief History From the beginning, documentary filmmaking helped shape, contextualise and define national identity, determining the ways spectators understood contemporary Europe and the wider world. Once film spectators began to tire of the early actualities, filmmakers brought new and exciting innovations to their ­stories in what Tom Gunning (in Elsaesser 1990: 56–62) later termed the “cinema of attractions”. The fiction film displayed magic tricks, performance and the drama of a chase—such as those found in the films of George Méliès— while the nonfiction type supplied the attractions of the world, which brought the wonders of travel and the sights of far-flung places to the cinema audience.

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

17

While these travel documentaries allowed film viewers to temporarily migrate from their ordinary lives into foreign lands in far-off places, nonfiction films also took migrants and migration as their subject matter. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (who would go onto make King Kong [1933] in Hollywood), with assistance by Marguerite Hamilton, Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) documents members of the Bakhtiari tribe as they undertake a journey to new pastures with their herds in central Persia. Made three years after Nanook of the North (1922), Grass differed from Flaherty’s film by not focusing on specific members of the tribe. Instead, it “captures the beauty and the dangers of a tribal culture from an almost objective point of view” (McLane 2012: 37). After completing the project, Cooper toured with the film on the lecture circuit to much acclaim. This led to Paramount’s Jesse Lasky offering to theatrically release the film whereupon it became a box-office hit. According to Ron Haver (1976: 17), Grass helped to conceive “a completely new kind of film, the documentary-nature-film-­ travelogue”, and the migrant was at its centre. This early educational purpose of documentary was picked up in Great Britain in the late 1920s by John Grierson, who saw in cinema the potential to mediate between governments and citizens across a vast Empire. Therefore, Grierson understood documentary film as both a sociological and aesthetic tool. According to Ian Aitken (2001: 165), Grierson’s approach to documentary was “sociological, in that it involved the representation of social relationships; and aesthetic, in that it involved the use of imaginative and symbolic means to that end”. As a reflection of this sociologically grounded mode, instead of operating as chief filmmaker, Grierson established a group of filmmakers and creatives to collaborate with for his vision of documentary film. These included Humphrey Jennings, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright and Alberto Cavalcanti, who, with the support of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), aimed to “promote the marketing of products of the British Empire and to encourage research and development among the member states” (McLane 2012: 75). The issue of migration was not always the focus of these films, but their wider aim at bringing a vast Empire together represents a certain cinematic migratory discourse. Such socially committed themes and topics became even more important once the Second World War began in 1939, and many of Grierson’s ‘Documentary Boys’, as they became known, contributed their technical expertise to the war effort as part of what was now known as the Crown Film Unit. In some of these films, colonialism and documentary filmmaking are connected with the aim of creating a comprehensible and comprehensive map of the British Empire. The Second World War, and the Nazis’ forcible ­displacement of Jews to concentration camps, saw documentations of migration in newsreels. And once the war had ended, documentaries such as Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah (1985) included some of the survivors’ stories and their return home.

18 

A. VAUGHAN

European Documentary Production Policies It was really during the 1980s, when geopolitical events began to reshape the borders and idea of Europe, that changes to film production (including documentary) took hold and have remained a part of contemporary nonfiction film output. Rosalind Galt (2006: 1) writes “that as the physical and political territory of Europe altered in the post-Cold War years, so, too, did its cultural imaginary”. It was in this decade that the European Union (EU) began to introduce media policies that would encourage a move away from solely individual national productions to a more cooperative cultural strategy that would showcase what Europe had to offer. And such policies are equally applicable to documentary. Eurodoc, a part of the EU’s MEDIA strategy (which became Creative Europe in 2014),1 and the European Documentary Network (EDN) are designed to bring nonfiction filmmakers and producers together to share their skills in a spirit of cooperation. But it is not just supranational cultural policy that has impacted documentary film towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Film festivals dedicated to documentary cinema have enabled some select few to enjoy successful theatrical runs. Continental successes like Touching the Void (2003) and To Be and To Have (2002) came to prominence on the festival circuit. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and Sheffield’s DocFest in Britain attract large audiences and prestigious films as well as functioning as a film market for distribution sales (McLane 2012: 360). In the twenty-first century, documentary film’s long tradition of flexibility in form has been further highlighted by technological advancements. For some theorists, like Craig Hight (in Winston 2013: 198), the rise of Web 2.0 and 3.0 and the participatory viewing cultures it encourages has fostered a documentary cinema that is “arguably less coherent” than at any other time in its onehundred-­ year history. Allied with the discourses of post-structuralism and postmodernism, John Corner (2002) posits the term “post-documentary” to explain the recent popularity of reality TV and docusoaps involving Joey Essex, the Kardashians and their ilk, and the ‘documentary-as-diversion’ purpose they seem to serve. Furthermore, digital cameras, smartphones and digital platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook make new forms of autobiographical documentary possible for almost anyone to produce with its accompanying ‘share’ culture opening up opportunities for content to be viewed by large numbers of people. Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose (Winston 2013: 366) provide a helpful summary of online documentary: We argue that this new context for documentary challenges its traditional epistemologies. Where twentieth century documentary depended for its functionality on an idea of the observer fixing the world with his [sic] camera, this new epistemology is entirely relational. It accepts that all knowledge is situated in particular embodied perspectives, the ‘actualities’ of online are the symbolic expression of this multi-perspectival, relational knowledge.

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

19

This more interactive form of documentary can be seen in the cinema vérité tradition in France during the 1960s. However, that documentary style visualised the interaction between documentary filmmaker and documentary subject. The digital connections and networks we can make on a day-to-day basis can lead now to interactions between audiences and films/filmmakers which can then lead into traditional theatrical formats, such as those seen in Life in a Day (2011) and Britain in a Day (2012). For Helen de Michiel and Patricia R. Zimmermann (in Winston 2013: 355), these developments are emblematic of what they define as “open space documentary”. These films are “fluid, collaborative, shape-shifting”, combine theatrical exhibition forms with those of performance and community art and speak to technological as well as geopolitical changes related to transnationalism and the results of increased migration (De Michiel and Zimmermann in Winston 2013: 355). These topics will now be discussed further before moving into close textual analysis of the chosen case-study documentary.

Documenting Migration: Some Current Trends Documentary production in twenty-first-century Europe has to be seen as part of wider effects of globalisation, where digital technologies and social media platforms actively promote self-documentation, what Hight (Winston 2013: 200) also terms “self-surveillance”, leading to a perceived collapsing of national borders. On the other hand, physical, geographical borders do still exist and can be understood in terms of the EU’s audiovisual policies to encourage cross-­fertilisation of filmmaking talent and skills across these borders with the goal of establishing a unified visual representation of Europe at the same time as celebrating its cultural diversity. These apparently diverse discursive streams— the idea of the individual publicly displaying forms of autobiography and European co-productions in the industrial context—interact and inform one another. Self-presentation, such a ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, fuels the documentary process and affects the form’s style and how audiences respond to nonfiction films. Meanwhile, the production of documentary feature films in Europe is unsurprisingly diverse. Different national government departments have their own media strategies. However, at the supranational level, the European Commission has its own policies in place. Furthermore, it should be understood that these cultural policies demonstrate a form of performative migration, with filmmakers supposedly able to cross national borders to collaborate on projects. It is logical then that some of the documentaries that have resulted from Eurodoc and EDN since the year 2000 should tackle issues of migration as their main subjects. Part of the Creative Europe initiative, the MEDIA sub-programme aims to help “launch projects with a European dimension” and introduce audiovisual works, including documentaries, to “markets beyond national and European borders” (Creative Europe website 2018). Its Eurodoc programme is specifically aimed at documentary producers and facilitates meetings between its over

20 

A. VAUGHAN

1000 members from 60 countries worldwide during the course of three training sessions. Some recent diverse films to be completed from the programme include Kinshasa Makambo (2018), a Congolese/French/German/ Norwegian/Qatari/Swiss co-production, and The Prince of Nothingwood (2017), a French-German production about Afghan filmmaker Salim Shaheen. Other documentaries produced since 2000 take the issue of migration as their central issue. Si-Guériki: La Reine-Mère (2002) is Idrissou Mora Kpai’s documentary about the Wassangari tribe of northern Benin, of which he is a member. After decades living in Europe, he returns to the region and observes the changes that have occurred in his absence. 12 Tangos—Return Ticket to Buenos Aires (2005) recounts the stories of Italian and Spanish immigrants who came to Argentina and is told against the backdrop of a concert. And Global Family (2018) concerns a Somali family living in exile in different parts of the world following the civil war. Similarly, the European Documentary Network, sponsored by Creative Europe MEDIA, encourages cooperation and informs members about funding and co-production opportunities. However, EDN provides individual consultations with its members through conferences, seminars and workshops (EDN Network website 2019). In both examples, the aim is to connect documentary creatives across national borders and to encourage transnational production opportunities. As digital technologies and cultural policies continue to undermine strict national boundaries, it is significant that these developments have coincided with the European migrant crisis, the documenting of which by news outlets and individuals demonstrates the importance nonfiction audiovisual forms have for our understanding of Europe as a space. The continent of Europe has witnessed centuries of colonisation and mobility that, coinciding with the movement of people, has helped nurture a migrant and diasporic tradition of filmmaking; that is a cinema addressing “questions of identity formation, [which] challenges national and ethnocentric myths, and revisits and revises traditional historical narratives” (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010: 2). These can be stories told about migrants or by people who have experienced exile themselves, and they often present a challenge to preconceived ideas about Europe as a physical location. According to Yosefa Loshitzky (2010: 8): The media and the arts have become a new site of articulation of Europe’s new sociocultural space, shaped and negotiated by the experience of displacement, diaspora, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and border crossing, ­challenging the traditional notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeanness.’ The growing migration to Europe and the emergence of large diasporas at the heart of the European metropolitan centers further enhance the questions of “Where is Europe? Whose Europe?”

And this link between Europe as a ‘cinematic space’ and a ‘geopolitical space’, including the ways the space in the film frame corresponds to physical

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

21

space, is crucial for Galt (2006: 231) in order to fully understand the “discourses of homelessness and belonging” that are so central to these stories. European fiction films released in the twenty-first century that deal with some of these themes include Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Head-On (2004) and Le Havre (2011). To varying degrees, films such as these visualise dominant opinions of the European migrant who are usually represented in negative terms, as threatening and “other” (Loshitzky 2010: 2). Loshitzky (2010: 2) proposes the dual meaning of “screening”—the process of allowing or refusing an individual entry and projecting an image—as an appropriate metaphor for the migrant experience as told in cinema in order to allow us to critically analyse representations. One of the conclusions she draws is that these images of migrants in film lead to a destabilising of coherent and straightforward definitions of ‘Europe’ as a geographical or cinematic space. Instead, these films serve as reminders that the contemporary experience of the region is based on a continual “negotiation over identity” (Loshitzky 2010: 14). However, due to its assumed closer connection to the ‘real’ world, documentary film is perhaps ideally suited to capturing these spatial implications with immediacy. Duncan Petrie (1992: 3), speaking at the Screening Europe conference organised by the British Film Institute in the early 1990s, summarised some of the issues Europe faced after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Petrie (1992: 3) explains that cinema produces images that make something visible and forces “an audience to look, to question and to reassess the nature of the world around them”, in this case Europe’s cultural diversity. However, documentary film can visualise the ‘real’ world of these issues without a fictional narrative frame. This can bring the spectator closer to events and topics depicted, just as documentary forms like videos captured on smartphones and live streaming can collapse distance and time even more radically. A powerful example of the latter was the photo of drowned three-year-old Aylun Kurdi, who was found washed up on a Turkish beach after fleeing Syria with his family in September 2015. This image galvanised public opinion on the migrant crisis and demonstrated the role news media and social platforms play in connecting audiences to contemporary socio-political events; a part that documentary film also performs. The ideological power of such images comes from the immediacy with which they are delivered to global audiences and the speed at which they are shared. They present instantaneous concrete visual evidence for discussion of what could otherwise be quite abstract themes of cultural identity, borders and exile. As Eva Rueschmann (2003: xxi) notes, film images of migration display a tension between “the local and the global, national and transnational, the meanings of ‘here’ and ‘there’”. These stories of individuals journeying in order to belong somewhere are characteristic of Thomas Elsaesser’s (2005: 92) definition of “double-occupancy”: Blood and soil, land and possession, occupation and liberation have to give way to a more symbolic or narrative way of negotiating contested ownership of both

22 

A. VAUGHAN

place and time, i.e., history and memory, for instance, inventing and maintaining spaces of discourse, as in the metaphoric occupation of Alsace or the increasing prominence achieved by hyphenated European nationals (German-Turkish, Dutch-Moroccan, French-Maghreb, British-Asian) in the spheres of literature, filmmaking, music and popular television shows.

Elsaesser’s is a call for a definition of identity no longer based on geographical associations. The “hyphenated European national” is a first step to this (arguably utopian) reinterpretation of the self which could be extended to include identifiers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or class. As already mentioned, for many years European film production has echoed this hybridity in terms of how one characterises the national provenance of co-productions, and this is no different for European documentary film. Of the documentaries that have won the Best Documentary prize at the European Film Awards so far in the twenty-first century, 2000–2018, nearly half have been co-productions (European Film Academy 2019). Some of these combine production companies from Europe and elsewhere in the world. Cambodia-born filmmaker Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) is a French-Cambodian production, and Nostalgia for the Light (2010) is a documentary that fuses the history of the cosmos and the search by mothers and wives for the ‘disappeared’ relatives of the Pinochet regime in Chile’s Atacama Desert and is a French/German/Chilean/Spanish project. Here, the international nature of such documentary productions can be seen as an albeit simplistic sign of our increasingly globalised world. But, significantly for this chapter, documentary can also help shape, change and produce discourses on migration. According to critic Randolph Lewis (2007: 83–84), channelling Lithuanian-born philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, documentary film plays a pivotal role in “putting a face on abstractions” and allows us to “glimpse ‘the face of the Other’”. As such, Lewis proposes a distinctly political purpose for contemporary documentaries. However, he is quick to qualify his assessment of the form, writing that “to the extent that documentary encourages this ethical rapport with the Other, it is a beautiful thing. To the extent that it substitutes for it, it is a travesty of Levinasian ethics” (2007: 83–84). Therefore, recent films that highlight the plight of migrants who flee to Europe in search of safety and a better life are only effective or successful, in Lewis’ view, if they lead to substantial change. There are parallels here with Jill Godmilow’s (1999: 92) critique of what she calls the “liberal documentary”, that is, nonfiction works that “produce desire for a better and fairer world, but not the useful knowledge required to change anything”. The spectator is expected to be moved or angered by what they see, but this often does not lead to any action on their part. This has led to some documentary filmmakers constructing works of nonfiction about the migrant crisis in non-traditional ways. For artist and writer, Ursula Biemann (in Juhasz and Lebow 2015: 121), the video essay form of documentary is best placed to tackle complex socio-political issues, precisely

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

23

because it does not attempt to provide a complete and linear discussion that instead understands migration as a “shadowy, supplementary system, organizing a transitory moment”. Serbian-born filmmaker Iva Radivojevic describes her 2014 film Evaporating Borders as a “visual essay” (Macaulay 2013) composed of five parts. Elsewhere, her approach has been received as both “a work of visual ethnography and as a provocation towards collective action” which provides an unflinching view of a search for common identity and belonging (Imre and Zimanyi 2016: 120). Other artists and filmmakers deliberately blur the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction in their modes of address. Steve McQueen’s short film Western Deep (2002) made use of innovative sound design and crosses the art installation/ film divide to provide an account of the dangerous conditions migrant workers endure in the Tautona gold mine of South Africa. Meanwhile, a filmmaker such as Michael Winterbottom organises elements of docudrama for In This World (2002) to create the impression that “his film is not just about the plight of a fictional character, but bears a testimony to a broader political phenomenon” (Loshitzky 2010: 120). Loshitzky (2010: 122) explains that using nonfiction techniques as part of a docudrama (such as non-professional actors, verbal testimony from ‘real’ migrants, handheld cinematography) has a distinctive impact upon the film’s spectator, which means that they are unable to “disavow the horrible reality and escape to a more tantalizing fiction, nor can he or she be deluded that ‘this is only a movie’ when it, too, becomes unsettling to the comfort zone of the suspension of disbelief”. T.  J. Demos (2013: xvi) usefully summarises how documentary and contemporary politics converge within the image of the migrant, writing “that artists confront geopolitical conflicts by also throwing documentary conventions into crisis. The resulting documentary-fictions of diasporic identities interweave the factual and the imaginary registers of the image for critical and creative effects”. Mieke Bal (Juhasz and Lebow 2015: 136) goes further in theorising “migratory aesthetics” to account for documentaries that take human migration as their subject: In this phrase, I use ‘aesthetics’ not so much as a philosophical domain, but rather as a term to refer, according to its Greek etymology, to a plural experience of sensate binding, a connectivity based on the senses. ‘Migratory’ refers to the traces, equally sensate, of the movements of migration that characterize contemporary culture… Migratory aesthetics is an aesthetic of geographical mobility beyond the nation-state and its linguistic uniformity.

Bal’s term emphasises the relationships and connections made in the process of filming documentaries about migrants. These can relate to encounters between filmmaker and migrant, or documentary text and spectator. Nevertheless, this means that documentary filmmakers have the opportunity to frame discourses on migration in various ways in their films in order to deconstruct simplistic geographical barriers to human coexistence. The rest of this

24 

A. VAUGHAN

chapter analyses Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016), the 2016 Best Documentary winner at the European Film Awards, as an example of how contemporary documentary negotiates the urgent plight of migrants travelling to Europe and ideas of nationhood.

Case Study: Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016) Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi, centres on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Located in the Mediterranean Sea, it is the southernmost part of Italy and covers roughly 7.8  square miles. Although belonging to Italy, Lampedusa is nearer to Tunisia in North Africa (approximately 70 miles off the coast compared to 127 miles from Sicily) which explains its recent media focus as being the site on which most North African migrants land. Sparsely populated and characterised by rocky cliff faces, sandy beaches and barren landscapes, it relies on tourism and fishing as the basis for its economy (Kushner 2016: 62). Travel websites that market the island based on its sandy beaches bely both its current status as the gateway for North African migration into Europe and its history as a penal colony during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kushner 2016: 63). In this way, Lampedusa has a long history of being a place for holding individuals who do not have a clear identity or home in the rest of the world. The Italian island is often described as the frontline in the current European migrant crisis. In 2014, reports estimated that as a whole over 200,000 “undocumented migrants came to Europe by sea, thousands drowning in the Mediterranean attempting to do so” (Kushner 2016: 60–61). In the previous year, “close to 15,000 migrants were processed through Lampedusa, most fleeing from Eritrea” meaning that at numerous times in recent years the number of migrants outnumbered the island’s native residents (Kushner 2016: 66–67). For writers such as Tony Kushner (2016: 64), “no place came to symbolise more the intense human tragedy and drama of modern migration, evoking sentiments of pity, shame and fear in equal measures”. To accommodate these large numbers of refugees, beginning in the late 1990s, a reception centre was built to help process the arrivals, which then expanded into a larger official detention centre near the island’s airport. Once there, they “were ‘distributed’ by plane to other facilities in Sicily or mainland Italy or deported to Libya” (Kushner 2016: 67). Kushner (2016: 75) outlines the impact this had on the local residents: In the detention centres of the island and in its everyday life, the migrants have both resisted and formed alliances with the local inhabitants. In February 2014 this led to the creation of the Charter of Lampedusa which was not ‘intended as a draft law’ but as the expression ‘of an alternative vision’ where ‘Differences must be considered as assets, a source of new opportunities, and must never be exploited to build barriers’.

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

25

It is evident that the rapid increase in migration from North Africa to Lampedusa in recent years has had a direct effect on the migrants, the island’s inhabitants and spectators to the crisis reading about or watching the events through the media. However, it also draws attention to and prompts discussions about borders. Are they physical barriers or more imaginary zones that help constitute notions of nationhood and individual identity? With these ideas in mind, Lampedusa becomes a liminal space where these questions can be developed. After all, is it “where Italy ends and Africa begins”, as human rights journalist Caroline Moorehead (Kushner 2016: 62) has described, the outskirts of the European border, or one of Alison Mountz’s (Kushner 2016: 67) “stateless spaces”? The mobility of borders was strikingly demonstrated when government operations caused Lampedusa’s border to be moved offshore so that the Italian navy could intercept migrant boats at sea (Ponzanesi 2016: 160). Rosi’s documentary can help us approach these complex issues and engage with some of the contemporary attitudes to the crisis. Fire at Sea takes its title from a Sicilian folk song that describes the bombing of an Italian warship docked in the port of Lampedusa during the Second World War (Ponzanesi 2016: 160). The tune is played in the documentary when a listener to the island DJ requests it. As a way of bridging the traumatic memory of the Second World War past with the ordeals of North African migrants, the song could also be interpreted as a reference to a migrant boat of Somalian and Eritrean refugees on 3 October 2013. The vessel caught fire and sank half a mile off the coast of Lampedusa, killing an estimated—the full figure will never be known—350 of its 500 passengers, in what some commentators called “the most dramatic human disaster in the Mediterranean Sea since the Second World War” (Kushner 2016: 67). As well as alluding to the parallels of national history, the song connects the island’s residents with the victims of contemporary forced and voluntary migration and the perils they face in trying to reach safety. Rosi, himself born in Eritrea, spent around 18 months on the island in order to familiarise himself with daily life, how the coast guard dealt with the migrant boats, and to earn the trust of some of the inhabitants that would serve as principal subjects for his documentary (Ponzanesi 2016: 160). Fire at Sea is divided between the island inhabitants’ daily lives and the arrival of migrant ships overseen by the coast guard, with these two sections often remaining separate. So we follow 12-year-old Samuele as he struggles to follow in his father’s footsteps as a fisherman (he gets terribly seasick), preferring instead to terrorise birds with his homemade slingshot. From the documentary, there is no indication that Samuele is aware of the migrant crisis’ effect on his island home as he is not shown interacting with or discussing the topic. The closest link between these two threads is provided by the local doctor. He treats the migrant arrivals, including a pregnant woman, and reflects to camera about some of his harrowing experiences. He also sees Samuele who comes to him complaining about shortness of breath which he thinks might be related to anxiety.

26 

A. VAUGHAN

Shot in long takes, with often a static camera and no voiceover, Fire at Sea belongs to the art film tradition of European cinema and the observational mode of documentary. It is interesting also that some analyses of the film describe it as neorealist in style (Ponzanesi 2016: 152). This is perhaps unsurprising considering that European forms of observational documentary, such as Free Cinema, emerged out of popular European fiction film styles, such as Neorealism in Italy. Coming to prominence during the 1940s and 1950s, Italian Neorealism privileged the representation of human reality and often resorted to location shooting and non-professional actors to achieve this realism. With this in mind, Samuele could be viewed as a more precocious, equally listless, variant on Bruno from Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Regardless of intent, perhaps Rosi is recalling past Italian cinematic modes as much as he is commenting on contemporary geopolitical movements. Fire at Sea premiered in February 2016 at the Berlin Film Festival, where it went onto win the Golden Bear, the first time a documentary had ever won the top prize at the festival. Jury President, actress Meryl Streep, praised the film for its “urgent, imaginative and necessary filmmaking” and said that it “compels our engagement and action” (The Guardian 2016). After a successful run at international film festivals, including Telluride and Toronto, the documentary was named as Italy’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards and was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar. Therefore, the high-profile critical praise and subsequent media attention Rosi’s film received allows us to examine how it communicates its message about the migrant crisis through documentary modes. As already mentioned briefly above, the documentary intercuts between the two threads of local residents’ daily lives and the arrival of migrants by boat with only the slightest of obvious connections between them. The island doctor, a compassionate and patient man, serves as the mediator between these two worlds. He helps process the refugees, checking their hands for signs of disease, and goes aboard the boats to inspect the corpses of those who have perished en route. He also treats Samuele for symptoms of anxiety. The only other time there is an overt connection between the residents and the migrant crisis it is kept at a distance through the island’s radio news broadcast. A woman listens to the latest bulletin which describes the details of a migrant vessel including loss of life as she prepares a meal. As she does so, she mutters “poor souls”. However, Rosi introduces symbolism to suggest links between his two narrative sequences. For the numerous migrant boats we see, Samuele and his father are filmed aboard the family fishing vessel. As counterpoint to the danger and uncertainty of the refugees’ sea-crossing to Lampedusa, Rosi captures the exploits of a lone scuba diver beneath the waves. And the local radio station finds its echo in the crackling of navy ship radios receiving distress calls from sinking migrant boats (Ponzanesi 2016: 152). Because Rosi does not resort to voiceover narration, a mainstay of mainstream educational documentary, his technique seems to be inviting the spectator to make these connections, to think for themselves and, most significantly, to see.

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

27

Fire at Sea is full of visual metaphors for ‘seeing’, what Ponzanesi (2016: 151–152) describes as “an intriguing aesthetic language of high symbolism”. Its clearest example is seen in the narrative journey of Samuele. It is noteworthy that he is the first ‘character’ we see in the documentary. Rosi films him walking towards the camera, inspecting a nearby tree and cutting off some branches to make his slingshot which he later uses to shoot cans, cactuses and birds. He is clearly quite skilled. However, later in the film Samuele visits an optician who informs him that he has a lazy eye as a result of closing it to aim his slingshot. He has to wear an eye patch over his good eye to encourage the lazy one to work harder and, therefore, see better. The composition of the image, as seen in Fig. 2.1, further emphasises the act of looking. Rosi depicts Samuele in close-up as he pulls the elastic of the slingshot back against his right cheek. The resulting horizontal lines draw the spectator’s gaze towards Samuele’s eyes, one visible, the other obscured and closed as he takes aim. The position of the camera, with Samuele aiming beyond the frame of action, means that we are not encouraged to identify with him; we are observing Samuele’s actions without him indicating any awareness of the camera. Rosi intersperses Samuele’s mundane travails with the life or death journeys of the migrants. We are encouraged to “connect the everyday of Samuele with the ‘normality’ of plucking dead or nearly dead bodies from the sea” (Kushner 2016: 91). Additionally, Samuele’s aimlessness, his inability to row a boat and seasickness make him seem apart from traditional island life in a way that parallels the migrants’ homelessness. And, for Ponzanesi (2016: 153), this technique has political implications: “[t]he perspective through the eyes of a young

Fig. 2.1  Samuele’s desire to ‘see’ as symbolism for audiences acknowledging the migrant crisis in Fire at Sea

28 

A. VAUGHAN

boy has the purpose of recalibrating the distorted view of political opportunism that uses migration as a scarecrow. It functions also as a warning against the rising indifference, apathy and short-sighted policy of the European Union”. Therefore, is Samuele’s anxiety related to the migrant crisis which, due to his inability to see clearly with both eyes, remains blurred and on the peripheries of his understanding? Finally, the metaphor of seeing and not-seeing is suggested in the differing representations of the individuals of these two worlds. The island residents, including Samuele, his grandmother, the doctor and the radio DJ, are more rounded personalities, compared to the migrants who are rarely individualised or even heard to speak. Consequently, the documentary’s visual representation of the migrants is synonymous with numerous EU countries’ reluctance to identify them. Furthermore, because the film encourages us to identify with the island inhabitants, and Samuele especially, the spectator is expected to adopt this Eurocentric viewing position with the expectation that, after seeing the horrific images of migrant corpses piled on top of one another in a boat’s hold, they will finally begin to see the plight of refugees. The cinematography and editing of Fire at Sea continues the call for spectators to ‘see’. Rosi often utilises static camera shots allied with a “poetically slow” (Ponzanesi 2016: 153) pace of editing, such as when a navy helicopter is prepared for take-off or when lines of migrants arrive to be screened at the island detention centre. The spectator thus has a fixed view of an event, restricted to whatever is contained within the frame. This is then contrasted with the more handheld, mobile shots of boarding the migrant boats which create immediacy. Rosi incorporates an additional visual quirk, summarised as follows: Throughout the film, Rosi often opts to mediate his gaze, letting us observe, or peep through, the right eye of Samuele hitting a target with his slingshot, through military monitors, mirrors, wet portholes encrusted with dried salt, through scuba-diving glasses searching the marvellous beauty of the island’s abyss at night, through the torchlight of the navy boats piercing the Mediterranean in search of survivors to be rescued. This ‘looking with’ and ‘looking through’ conveys the indirect gaze, albeit non-intervening, of the filmmaker. (Ponzanesi 2016: 161)

This mediated documentary gaze is best articulated during a sequence in which Rosi travels back to Lampedusa on a navy boat which has just rescued a group of migrants (see Fig. 2.2). He silently observes some of the passengers through a transparent plastic sheet, sea spray forming droplets on the see-­ through cover. The lens settles on one male migrant who looks directly at the camera with a blank expression, the sheet separating him, Rosi and us from one another. Through such a composition, where the image that is presented is mediated by the plastic sheet and the film camera, the spectator is forced to look at the migrant whose exhausted and helpless gaze looks back at us. This is in stark contrast to the third-person identification the viewer has with Samuele.

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

29

Fig. 2.2  Rosi’s mediated documentary gaze of the migrant ‘other’ in Fire at Sea

In the latter, an unobtrusive, observational function of documentary is preferred compared to the direct address and challenging gaze of the migrant. A similar shot is repeated later in the film when the migrants are being processed. Each stands in front of a digital camera holding a number for their photo to be taken. The sequence shows human beings being depersonalised to mere numbers. Rosi cuts between each ‘portrait’ with some of the migrants feigning a slight smile for the camera, others clearly distressed. The sequence ends with another male refugee not looking at the digital camera, but Rosi’s film camera as if directly addressing the audience to pay attention. In each of these examples, the film spectator is required to ‘look with’ or ‘look through’ in order to fully perceive the documentary image and understand the socio-political suffering these individuals are experiencing. Rosi’s decision to film Lampedusa’s residents and the migrants in such different ways, with the former more clearly identified than the latter, could have laid his documentary open to criticism for bias. However, Rosi seems to be suggesting that it is only by accepting that we as spectators are complicit in similar processes of ‘othering’ refugees that we will be able to see the reality of the European migrant crisis with both eyes open.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of the state of European documentary in the twenty-first century. By summarising some of the key points from the history of European documentary, including significant movements such as Free Cinema and cinema vérité, we can see how the past still influences the documentary style of the present. However, the rise in digital communications on the global stage has also impacted on the ways filmmakers produce nonfic-

30 

A. VAUGHAN

tion and spectators consume it, with social media especially contributing to autobiographical forms of documentary in a culture of self-presentation. EU-backed media production strategies beginning in the 1980s also influenced documentary production. Policies like Eurodoc facilitate the EU’s objective to create a recognisable European media culture that seeks to retain culturally specific characteristics. Co-productions, documentary networks (like the EDN) and funding opportunities help to make this aim a reality, even though nationally specific documentary production policies still exist. On a broader scale, these policies as well as Web 2.0 highlight questions about the integrity of European borders in the twenty-first century. Contemporary European documentary has responded with filmmakers producing documentaries that dramatise the ‘real’ world stories of migration to the continent. By using Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea as a case-study example, it was shown how a recent documentary represents and reflects upon the European migrant crisis. Rosi deftly combines observational documentary techniques with a rich symbolism based on audiences’ in/ability to ‘see’ the plight of these refugees which further characterises his cinematography and editing. The decision to build the documentary around the binary of the island residents and the migrants serves to problematise political rhetoric surrounding the crisis and the failure by governments to accept responsibility. Here, the “island becomes a microcosm for Europe where the liminal and precarious existences, of both fishermen and refugees, convey an idea of Europe from the South where different marginalities coexist and interweave, avoiding celebratory discourses on Europe as the ideal haven” (Ponzanesi 2016: 165). As a result, the documentary constructs the possibility of a Europe that does not disavow the migrant ‘other’ (a role the popular media seem so eager to attribute to refugees) but makes it clear that it is up to the spectator to create such a place.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. What responsibilities do European documentary filmmakers have? Why are they significant? 2. What are some of the challenges facing European documentary filmmakers in the twenty-first century? (Consider technology, audiences, other audiovisual content) 3. What other twenty-first-century European documentaries have you seen? How do they correspond to or engage with ideas of ‘Europeanness’? 4. How do you see documentary forms changing in the next decades? What types of social, cultural, political, technological changes will documentary need to respond to?

2  DOCUMENTING DIFFERENCE: MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN… 

31

Note 1. See https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/creative-europe_en for further information on Creative Europe and the MEDIA programme.

References Agence France-Presse. 2016. Berlin Film Festival Awards Top Prize to Refugee Crisis Documentary Fire at Sea. The Guardian, February 21. https://www.theguardian. com/film/2016/feb/21/berlin-film-festival-awards-top-prize-to-refugee-crisisdocumentary-fire-at-sea. Aitken, Ian. 2001. European Film Theory and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Berghahn, Daniela, and Claudia Sternberg. 2010. European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Corner, John. 2002. Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions. Television & New Media 3 (3): 255–269. Creative Europe. 2018. Welcome to the MEDIA Sub-programme. http://edn.network/edn/. Accessed 5 December 2019. Demos, T.J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de Michiel, Helen & Zimmermann, Patricia R. 2013. Documentary as an Open Space. In The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute. Elsaesser, Thomas. 1990. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI. ———. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. European Documentary Network. 2019. Stimulating Networks & Knowledge Within the Documentary Sector. http://edn.network/edn/. Accessed 5 December 2019. European Film Academy. 2019. European Film Academy Archive Page. https://www. europeanfilmacademy.org/Archive.39.0.html. Accessed 28 August 2018. Galt, Rosalind. 2006. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New  York: Columbia University Press. Godmilow, Jill. 1999. What’s Wrong with the Liberal Documentary. Peace Review 11 (1): 91–98. Gunning, Tom. 1990. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant Garde. In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 56—62, London: BFI. Haver, Ron. 1976. Merian C.  Cooper: First King of Kong. American Film 11 (3): 14–23. Hight, Craig. 2013. Beyond Sobriety: Documentary Diversions. In The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute. Imre, Aniko, and Eszter Zimanyi. 2016. Frames and Fragments of European Migration. Transnational Cinemas 7 (2): 118–134. Juhasz, Alexandra, and Alisa Lebow, eds. 2015. A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

32 

A. VAUGHAN

Kushner, Tony. 2016. Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis Ethics, Representation and History. Mobile Culture Studies Journal 2: 59–92. Lewis, Randolph. 2007. “The Face of the Other” and Documentaries. The Velvet Light Trap a Critical Journal of Film and Television (60): 83–84. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Macaulay, Scott. 2013. 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Filmmaker Magazine. https://filmmakermagazine.com/people/iva-radivojevic-2/#.XBjcI_Z2tyw. Accessed 5 December 2019. McLane, Betsy A. 2012. A New History of Documentary Film: Second Edition. New York: Continuum. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 2007. Italian Neo-realism. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook, 3rd ed. London: BFI. Petrie, Duncan. 1992. Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema. London: BFI. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2016. Of Shipwrecks and Weddings: Borders and Mobilities in Europe. Transnational Cinemas 7 (2): 151–167. Reuschmann, Eva. 2003. Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Winston, Brian. 2013. The Documentary Film Book. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute.

CHAPTER 3

Scotland’s Onscreen Identities: Otherness and Hybridity in Scottish Cinema Emily Torricelli

Definitions Clydesidism A discourse in which Scotland is represented as an urban, industrial, masculine space. Initially praised as an alternative to the regressive discourses of tartanry and the Kailyard, Clydesidism has been criticised for glorifying the working class while glossing over systemic problems. Hybrid Identity Identities that are constructed to accommodate difference. For example, a hybrid national identity would be inclusive of not only traditional understandings of nationality, but also those differentiated by race, gender, sexuality, religion, ableness and so on. The Kailyard A Scottish representational discourse focusing on the rural Lowlands. The discourse of the Kailyard originates in late nineteenth-century sentimental novels by authors such as J. M. Barrie, who look at parochial village life from a distanced, nostalgic perspective. As such, it has often been considered a limiting or regressive discourse due to its emphasis on the past; however, it can also be

E. Torricelli (*) University of York, York, UK © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_3

33

34 

E. TORRICELLI

seen as providing an alternative space that allows for transformation and the exploration of possibilities. Othering The process of exclusion based on difference to those who ‘belong’. For example, to be a woman is to be not a man; to be black, not white; to be queer, not cis/heteronormative. The Other is those who are constructed not to belong; Otherness is the qualities that construct the Other. Tartanry A Scottish representational discourse focused on the Highlands and the Jacobite Rebellion. This discourse originates in the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott and others and can still be seen in Scottish culture today. On the one hand, tartanry, with its emphasis on past failures, can be seen as reductive, but, on the other hand, like the Kailyard, it also can be seen to provide a mythic space in which alternate histories can be explored.

Introduction This chapter considers questions of national cinemas and hybrid identities. The national context is a framework useful to film criticism, industries and audiences alike. However, the idea that there can be a cohesive understanding of the nation seemingly falls apart under the conditions of the modern world. ‘The national’ is destabilised from above by globalisation and the easy flow of people and ideas across borders, and from below by minority groups who want their voices to be heard. And in a cinematic context, an individual film’s national identity is rendered more complex when one considers the realities of film production and consumption. Andrew Higson (2000: 67) problematises the concept of a stable national identity: the degree of cultural cross-breeding and interpenetration, not only across borders but also within them, suggests that modern cultural formations are invariably hybrid and impure. They constantly mix together different ‘indigeneities’ and are thus always re-fashioning themselves, as opposed to exhibiting an already fully formed identity.

Any formation of the national specificity of a film, then, would need to be inclusive of hybrid forms of identity. This chapter considers the case of Scottish cinema. As a small nation with its own devolved political institutions and relative autonomy from the United Kingdom, Scotland presents an interesting case for how films are labelled with a national identity. A nation within a nation, Scotland holds both insider and outsider status within Britain. As such, much of its cultural production has been dominated by discourses that have been appropriated from without.

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

35

Furthermore, basing the national identity of Scottish film on the production context and the provenance of funding is also problematic since while there are limited sources of Scottish film funding, even low-budget feature films require investment from other non-Scottish sources such as the BFI, Channel Four, BBC Films or Netflix. A film defined as Scottish will almost always qualify equally as British, or in cases where there has been international co-production or transnational sources of funding and production partners involved, ‘Scottish’ films might equally be labelled European or even transnational. Therefore, Scottish cinema as constructed as a national cinema is in a unique position, one that, as will be shown, has allowed it to develop a sense of ‘Scottishness’ that is hybrid, plural and contingent.

Scotland: Other and Not-Other Before considering the development of hybrid identities in Scottish film, it is necessary to consider the Otherness of Scotland and its cinema in relation to Britain and British cinema. Some scholars, such as Michael Hechter (1975), see the two nations in a core/peripheral relationship, where England is the centre and Scotland the margin. Therefore, there is inequality between England and Scotland because the former dominates the latter. Scotland’s Otherness stems from its subordinate position. Other scholars, such as Tom Nairn (1981), reject this strictly postcolonial understanding of Scottish identity in favour of a model that sees Scotland as a ‘junior partner’ to England. In this case, Scotland, due to the Act of Union of 1707, which combined the two nations into one state, modernised during the same time frame as England’s metropolitan centres. Thus, the inequality that creates the core/peripheral relationship does not exist between the two. Rather, Scotland’s Otherness stems from the Scots’ own eagerness to participate in the Union, the result of which is the appropriation of Scottish culture as British. Successful cultural figures and their works—historian Thomas Carlyle, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, documentarian John Grierson, for example—are subsumed into a British national identity. What is left for Scotland, according to critics like Nairn, is an ‘inferior’ popular culture. Scottish identity is reduced to stereotypical discourses. Another way Scotland could be Othered in relation to Britain is in its relationship to Europe. Scotland has strong historical ties to the continent, such as the ‘auld alliance’ of 1295 with France. And today, Scotland’s European affinities remain strong, if their vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum—62% to remain in the European Union, the highest of the United Kingdom’s four countries (The Electoral Commission (UK) 2019)—is any indication. Likewise, Scottish cinema has long harboured European ambitions. According to Philip Schlessinger (1990: 231–232), looking to Europe for financial support in the early 1990s was seen as a way for Scottish filmmakers to reduce their dependence on the British film industry. And for Jonathan Murray (2007: 84), a turn by Scottish filmmakers in the 2000s towards European co-production brought with it an interest in the aesthetics and themes of European art cinema.

36 

E. TORRICELLI

For David McCrone (2001: 52), it is the everyday lived experience in Scotland that allows its people to feel culturally distinct from the rest of Britain. After all, Scotland has a separate official church (Presbyterian, not Anglican) and separate legal and educational systems. Post-devolution, it also has been able to tailor its social programmes to fit local needs. However, the everyday lived experience also carries with it markers of British culture such as the Royal Mail, the BBC and National Health. And there are other commonalities between Scotland and the majority of the United Kingdom’s culture that must not be forgotten, chiefly race (whiteness), religion (Protestant Christianity) and language (English). McCrone (2001: 182) argues that Scottish identity and British identity are complementary, not competitive. Thus, it is possible to identify as Scottish and British simultaneously; the more important question is when and how people choose to activate these identities (McCrone 2001: 192). ‘Scottishness’ therefore is an inherently plural identity and thus provides fertile ground for the development of other hybrid identities.

‘Traditional’ Scottish Identity In literature and visual culture, ‘Scottishness’ has traditionally been constructed along three representational discourses: tartanry, the Kailyard and Clydesidism. The first two of these are probably most familiar to international cinema audiences and can be seen in films such as Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948), Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953), The Little Minister (1934), Whisky Galore! (1949) and, more recently, Braveheart (1995) and Brave (2012). However, some cultural critics consider these two discourses to be highly limiting forms of representation. Tartanry originated in early nineteenth-century romantic literature and is typified by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It is associated with the Highlands and the eighteenth-century Jacobite Rebellion. Kailyard representations, which stem from the late nineteenth-century sentimental novels of J. M. Barrie and others, offer a nostalgic look back at the rural Lowlands from the position of a young man who has moved on to better things. Both discourses therefore present a vision of Scotland that is firmly grounded in the past. Tartanry, through its romanticised use of history, may seem like other European literatures of the nineteenth century, but whereas these literatures used a heroic sense of the past to create nationalist sentiment, in Scotland this was not possible, because the historical moment evoked by tartanry, the Jacobite rebellion, was not one characterised by great feats of heroism, but ultimately by defeat and failure (Craig 1982: 10). There is no sense of futurity created, then, through this mode of representation because, in focusing on past failures, it offers no potential for later success. A similar vein runs through the Kailyard. Craig (1982: 11) does admit that one of the redeeming features of the Kailyard is that it uses the language of ordinary people, but it, too, offers no possibility of a future for Scotland. It is addressed to an audience that has left behind a Scottish identity for a British middle-class one. Craig explains that the way the Kailyard condescendingly

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

37

characterises its subjects is meant to distance the reader from any sense of Scottish national identity. He says that “What has to be elided from that mythic world, therefore, is any suggestion that there could be a positive development of the culture from within the social classes portrayed by the writer” (Craig 1982: 11). The representation of Scotland in the Kailyard is located in both the authors’ and audience’s past. It may be looked back upon sentimentally, but it is nevertheless behind them. Both tartanry and the Kailyard, then, are limiting modes of representation because, in placing Scotland in the past, they do not allow for any sense of the future. For Edward Said (1978: 3), Orientalism is the discourse by which the non-­ Western Other is represented by the West. These reductive discourses can be so pervasive that they cannot be avoided when speaking of the Other. In a way, the discourses of tartanry and the Kailyard operate as an Orientalism internal to Western culture. For early scholars of Scottish cinema, tartanry and the Kailyard, in their cinematic forms, continued to be limiting in their association of Scottishness with pastness, and they put limits on indigenous Scottish filmmaking as well. These were the main images of Scotland that had been appropriated by Hollywood and taken up by its peripheral industries, British cinema included. And, since there was very limited film production within Scotland until the 1980s, these were the only images Scots could see of themselves on screen. Thus, cinematic images of Scotland were not only limited to these regressive representations, but they were also representations from the outside. And when Scots began producing films for themselves, for the most part they did not break away from the traditions of tartanry and the Kailyard. Rather “the dominant filmic representations of their country have been articulated elsewhere, and the indigenous Scottish institutions which exist to foster film culture have never articulated as a priority the helping of Scottish film-makers toward the discourses which would effectively counter the dominant ones” (McArthur 1982: 58). In other words, Scottish cinema has had a limited scope because the images it uses were imitated from a culture outside its own, while at the same time those making films in Scotland were not encouraged to find alternatives to these modes of representation. In more recent years, scholars have taken a more favourable view of these discourses. Revisiting the topic, Cairns Craig (1996: 70) found that constructing Scotland as a mythic space removed from the forward progress of history allows for the exploration of counter-histories. For Duncan Petrie (2000: 32), Scotland has often been constructed as a space of transformation: Viewed from the centre, Scotland is a distant periphery far removed from the modern, urban and cosmopolitan social world inhabited by the kind of people involved in the creation of such images. Consequently, Scotland tends to be represented as a picturesque, wild and often empty landscape, a topography that in turn suggests certain themes, narrative situations and character trajectories. Central to this is the idea of remoteness—physical, social, moral—from metropolitan rules, conventions and certainties. Scotland is consequently a space in which a range of fantasies, desires and anxieties can be explored and expressed;

38 

E. TORRICELLI

alternatively an exotic backdrop for adventure and romance, or a sinister and oppressive locale beyond the pale of civilization.

However, in Hollywood and British cinema, this transformative ability was usually reserved for outsiders, not Scots. Take Vincente Minnelli’s adaptation of the musical Brigadoon (1954). Two American hunters stumble upon the Highland village of Brigadoon, which rises out of the mist every one hundred years, though only a day has passed for its inhabitants. The hunters spend the day singing and dancing with the townsfolk, and Tommy, the one played by Gene Kelly, falls in love with Fiona, a lass played by Cyd Charisse. However, it transpires that, should one of the townsfolk leave, the spell will break and the town will be gone forever. The hunters return to New York, but Tommy feels something lacking in his life. He returns to Scotland, and miraculously the mists part allowing him to enter and remain in Brigadoon. Thus Tommy, an American, is offered a chance to change, while Fiona and her kin must forever be locked in the past.

Initial Steps Towards a Hybrid Scottish Identity Until the 1980s, indigenous Scottish film production was primarily state- and industrially financed documentary. A few narrative films such as The Gorbals Story (1950), The Brave Don’t Cry (1952) and Bill Douglas’s British Film Institute-backed autobiographical trilogy—My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978)—were produced during these times. What many of these documentary and narrative films (the Bill Douglas Trilogy being a notable exception) have in common is the discourse of Clydesidism. Clydesidism was originally thought of as an alternative to the regressive discourses of tartanry and the Kailyard in its attempt to acknowledge the forces of modernity. In its representation of Scotland as working class, Clydesidism provided an alternative to the rural spaces of tartanry and the Kailyard while also connecting it to an industrialised and urban world—primarily that of Glasgow and the surrounding Clydeside region—as well as contemporary discourses and aesthetics of realism (Caughie 1990: 16). McArthur analyses Clydeside films such as Floodtide (1949) and The Brave Don’t Cry, however, and finds them just as lacking. While Clydesidism offers alternative images, they are a “celebration of its [Clydeside’s] people rather than the analysis of their situation” (McArthur 1982: 52). For McArthur, Clydeside films, instead of using their industrial settings to explore the reasons for Scotland’s systemic problems, glorify the working-class male. Clydesidism became another reductive discourse like tartanry and the Kailyard. The 1980s saw an increase in the production of narrative feature films in Scotland thanks to new funding sources like the Scottish Film Production Fund and Channel Four, as well as a cultural shift in Scottish nationalism following the failed devolution referendum of 1979. Most prominent among these films were the Scottish-based comedies of director Bill Forsyth. His three

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

39

films set in Glasgow—That Sinking Feeling (1979), Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Comfort and Joy (1984)—combine a quirky sense of humour with a more contemporary view of Scotland. That Sinking Feeling is a heist movie wherein unemployed Glaswegian youths plot to steal sinks, Gregory’s Girl is about a clueless teenaged boy who falls in love with the only girl on the football team, and Comfort and Joy depicts the rivalry between two ice cream companies as a mob war. Forsyth’s third film, Local Hero (1983), constructs a different Scotland than his previous films. Set in a remote coastal village, it tells the story of Mac (Peter Riegert), an American businessman who is sent to Scotland by his boss (Burt Lancaster) to buy the fictional town of Ferness for the construction of an oil refinery. While the townsfolk conspire to take every last penny they can out of Mac’s company, he, and later his boss, are transformed by the local landscape. The film makes use of Kailyard discourses, first through its use of locale and references to Scottish folklore, and second through similarities to Kailyard comedy films of the 1940s and 1950s, most notably Alexander Mackendrick’s The Maggie (1954). However, there are ways in which the film connects to the contemporary Scotland Forsyth constructs in his other films. Ferness is a diverse town inclusive of teenage punks (one of them played by the star of Gregory’s Girl), African ministers and Russian sailors. And the inclusion of the oil industry is significant; North Sea oil and the potential financial independence it could bring spurred on the growth of Scottish political nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, in Local Hero, Forsyth constructs a Scotland that is both traditional and contemporary. Forsyth’s films, especially Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero, were widely acclaimed and seen as important not only to an emerging Scottish cinema, but also to a general British film revival in the early 1980s. As such, other Scottish film productions tried to imitate Forsyth’s style and success. For example, Restless Natives (1985) is about two Edinburgh youths who use their motorbike to rob Highland tour buses and blends traditional use of Scottish landscape and folklore with a contemporary urban setting and a Forsythian sense of humour. In this way, the Scottish films of the 1980s construct Scottish identity as a hybrid of both the traditional and the modern and paved the way for more inclusive Scottish identities in the decades to follow.

New Scottish Cinema, New Scottish Masculinities The 1990s were particularly productive for cinema in Scotland. Along with devolution and the reestablishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the decade saw a number of changes to the way Scottish film was funded. In 1997, the Scottish Film Production Fund was combined with other Scottish film agencies to form Scottish Screens (Petrie 2000: 177). Other funding bodies such as the Glasgow Film Fund were formed, the Scottish Arts Council started administering lottery funds for filmmaking (Petrie 2000: 174–175) and television networks like Channel Four and the BBC continued to support Scottish film production (Petrie 2000: 178–179).

40 

E. TORRICELLI

There were also a number of internationally successful Scottish films produced during the decade. Shallow Grave (1995) and Trainspotting (1996) were back-to-back critical and commercial successes, both at home and abroad for director Danny Boyle. My Name Is Joe (1998), Orphans (1999) and Ratcatcher (1999) all fared well on the international festival circuit. Even Hollywood took a renewed interest in Scotland, producing big-budget films such as Braveheart and another version of Rob Roy (1995), which, though backed by United Artists, was developed in Scotland. Though many Hollywood films from the 1990s seem to use ‘traditional’ constructions of Scotland without irony, Rob Roy destabilised these kinds of Scottish identity. In the film, Rob Roy MacGregor (Liam Neeson), the Scottish folk hero who had been popularised in Sir Walter Scott’s 1817 novel of the same name, has his personal code of honour challenged when villainous Englishman Archie Cunningham (Tim Roth) steals money Rob owes to his uncle and rapes Rob’s wife Mary (Jessica Lange). By making the parentage of both Cunningham and Mary’s baby uncertain, the film breaks down the binary of ‘manly’ Scotsmen opposed to ‘effeminate’ Englishmen. Other Scottish films from the decade also critique traditional forms of Scottish identity and engage with questions of masculinity. Orphans, for example, critiques Clydesidism as it follows siblings Thomas, Michael, Sheila and John Flynn in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s death. The four almost self-destruct as they commit acts of overzealous piety, stubborn individualism, revenge and fraud and are only saved by the realisation that they must rely on each other to survive. As such, the film shows Clydesidism’s construction of Scottish masculinity to be outdated for a Scotland that is no longer a welfare state. Trainspotting, adapted from the popular Irvine Welsh novel, also critiques ‘traditional’ Scottish masculinity at the same time it offers alternatives to it. The film chronicles the misadventures of Scottish heroin addict Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his friends Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Begbie (Robert Carlyle) and Tommy (Kevin McKidd). Begbie and Tommy are used to critique and parody various stereotypes of the Scottish working-class male, who ultimately cannot survive in a post-industrial Scotland. The other three represent alternative forms of Scottish masculinity—feminised, reflective, in tune with global pop culture and, most importantly, fluid—that allow them to thrive in a modern, neoliberal world. In questioning and offering alternatives to ‘traditional’ forms of Scottish masculinity, Scottish cinema in the 1990s continued and broadened the 1980s trend of constructing inclusive Scottish identities. However, it should be noted that these identities are almost exclusively white and male—notable exceptions include Blue Black Permanent (1992), Stella Does Tricks (1996) and The Winter Guest (1997). The new millennium, however, would see the construction of Scottish identities that were inclusive of other races, ethnicities, genders and sexualities.

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

41

Twenty-First-Century Hybrid Scottish Identities The 2000s saw many changes in Scottish film, both in terms of style and content, and in terms of film financing. In 2006, Scottish Screen was dissolved, later to be replaced by Creative Scotland, a public funding body for the arts in general, in 2010. While active, Scottish Screen had drawn criticism for favouring American independent-style productions such as The Near Room (1995), The Slab Boys (1997) and The Debt Collector (1999) that subsequently had trouble competing in an international market (Murray 2015: 48–49). The perceived failure of Scottish film post-Trainspotting was blamed on a mimicry of American film, and, as a consequence, filmmakers shifted away from making films of this style (Murray 2015: 50), with some turning towards international co-production as an alternative. At the same time, there was an increase in other kinds of transnational collaboration, particularly with Scandinavian partners, as exemplified by films involving the Glasgow-based independent Sigma Films and Danish director Lars von Trier’s production company, Zentropa, such as Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), Dogville (2003) and Red Road (2006). Furthermore, Scotland was also increasingly becoming a global film location for Bollywood productions such as Pyaar Ishq aur Mohabbat (2001). At the same time that production of film in Scotland took a more international turn, the films themselves were focusing more on women and racial and ethnic minorities. Scottish film of the 2000s saw greater opportunities for female filmmakers and more explorations of women’s experiences. Though, as previously mentioned, the New Scottish Cinema of the 1990s was predominantly led by male filmmakers, there were several key contributions to Scottish film made by women in the 1990s, including experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait’s feature Blue Black Permanent, Coky Giedroyc’s Stella Does Tricks and Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature Ratcatcher. Women’s involvement in Scottish filmmaking would continue on into the new century with Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), Shona Auerbach’s Dear Frankie (2004), Andrea Arnold’s Cannes Jury Prize-winning debut Red Road and Pratibha Parmar’s Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006). Traditionally, Scottish identity has been constructed as masculine. According to David McCrone (2001: 142): […] those identities diagnosed as archetypically Scottish by friend and foe alike— the Kailyard, Tartanry and Clydesidism—have little place for women. There is no analogous ‘lass o’pairts’; the image of Tartanry is a male-military image (and kilts were not a female form of dress); and the Clydeside icon was a skilled, male worker who was man enough to care for his womenfolk. Even the opponents of these identities took them over as their own images of social life.

Many of the twenty-first-century films that focus on women’s experiences therefore broaden the idea of what it means to be Scottish. For example, Morvern Callar suggests a transnational aspect to Scottish identity. In the film,

42 

E. TORRICELLI

Morvern (Samantha Morton), a young woman working in a grocery store in coastal Scotland, finds her boyfriend dead by suicide on Christmas morning, his last request that she send the manuscript for his novel off to a publisher. She does so—substituting her own name for his—and takes her friend Lana (Kathleen McDermott) on a Spanish holiday with her deceased boyfriend’s money. Ramsay’s play with identity—Morton speaks with her own English accent, Morvern and Lana pretend to be Swedish, and at one point Morvern calls herself ‘Jackie’, a name she found on a necklace—works to destabilise Morvern’s Scottish identity, as does Morvern’s apparent detachment. No matter where she goes, Morvern seems isolated from other people. According to Ian Goode (2007: 4), Morvern’s isolation differentiates her from European culture at the same time it links her to it. In fact, the only place Morvern seems to feel at ease is in nature, both in Scotland and in Spain. ‘Nature’ is everywhere; it is not something that is limited by national borders, and, in this way, neither is Morvern. Thus, Ramsay constructs female Scottish identity as transnational. Red Road, on the other hand, takes a traditionally masculine Scottish space, Glasgow, and reclaims it as female. In the film, Jackie (Kate Dickie) uses her position as a CCTV camera operator to stalk Clyde (Tony Curran), the man who killed her family in a car accident, before eventually following him in person to his home in the iconic Glaswegian Red Road tower blocks. As Laura Mulvey (1975: 11–12) has theorised, the gaze, or the act of looking (particularly at women), in the cinema has generally been reserved for men. Jackie’s use of the CCTV cameras to watch over Glasgow and the pleasures she derives from it subverts the male gaze. Furthermore, by the film’s end, Jackie is able to rejoin the world below as an active participant. As such, “In moving from a passive to active viewer, Jackie [….] inhabits this particular space, Glasgow. [Jackie’s gaze], then, transforms Glasgow into a site of female spectatorship and pleasure” (Torricelli 2018: 7). Arnold therefore constructs a Scotland that is inclusive of women’s experiences and desires. Meanwhile, other films focused on Scotland’s diasporic communities, often being made by members of those communities themselves. For Homi Bhabha (1998: 937), though, this act of creation by the marginalised does not create a counter-narrative. Rather, “they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to ‘translate,’ and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity” (Bhabha 1998: 937–938). In other words, diasporic cultures use their liminal status to reshape the national culture to include themselves in it. Films by Peter Capaldi and Don Coutts turned their attention to Scotland’s diasporic Italian community. Capaldi’s Strictly Sinatra (2001) follows a Scots-Italian Frank Sinatra impersonator (Ian Hart) who becomes involved with local gangsters. These men define their ethnic identity based on Hollywood stereotypes of Italian Americans rather than on the lived experience of Scots-Italians. The film therefore destabilises identity by revealing it to be performative and informed by images from popular culture. Coutts’s American Cousins (2003), on the other hand, explores the cultural differences between Scots-Italians and Italian Americans. In the film, Roberto

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

43

(Gerald Lepkowski), who runs his family’s ice cream parlour/chip shop (a stereotypical Scot-Italian profession), gets a visit from his American cousin Gino (Danny Nucci) and his associate (Dan Hedaya), who work for a different kind of ‘family business’ and have come to Glasgow to lay low after an encounter with the Ukrainian mob goes awry. Although at first these cousins seem to be polar opposites, thanks to their shared diasporic heritage, they turn out to have more in common than initially thought. In this way, the film destabilises a homogeneous national identity by privileging the adaptability of diasporic ones. Thus, the films allow Capaldi and American Cousins writer Sergio Casci to explore their own experiences of Scotland’s diasporic Italian community. Other films turned their attention towards the Asian diaspora in Scotland. Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss…, for example, draws comparisons between the outsider experiences of Irish immigrants and Scots-Asians. Casim (Atta Yaqub), a Pakistani Muslim, meets and begins a love affair with his sister’s music teacher Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish Catholic woman. A number of complications arise due to their cultural backgrounds. Casim is expected to marry a cousin from Pakistan, and his involvement with a white woman could complicate his older sister’s upcoming marriage and younger sister’s plans to go away for university. Meanwhile, Roisin’s promotion to full-time teacher is impeded by her traditionalist parish priest who disapproves of her live-in relationship with a Muslim. Ultimately, Casim chooses Roisin over his family obligations. Roisin’s racial identity does not affect her sense of belonging to the extent that it does for Casim; she is not put into a position where she must decide between love and family. There is more variety in the way that Casim and his family relate to Scotland, however. Casim may feel that his Scottish and Pakistani identities are in conflict with one another, but his youngest sister Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh) embraces an identity that is simultaneously Scottish and Asian. Loach, of course, has been a key figure in the British realist movement since the beginning of his film and television career in the 1960s. As a white English filmmaker, he might seem oddly posed to make such a nuanced examination of race in Scotland. However, Loach previously had made three successful films— Carla’s Song (1996), My Name Is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002)—that had been financed by Scottish funds and at least partially filmed there. As such, many began to identify Loach as a Scottish filmmaker (Torricelli 2017: 96). Furthermore, Loach’s realist style (e.g., shooting on location and using non-­ professional actors), and his positioning of both his white and non-white protagonists in Ae Fond Kiss… as outsiders, avoids any exoticising effect. A handful of Scottish films have addressed questions of both gender and racial difference. The racial conflict in Ae Fond Kiss… is arguably exacerbated by the gendered expectations placed on Casim and Roisin. Nina’s Heavenly Delights is another film that looks at racial and gender, as well as sexual, ­difference in Scotland in the 2000s. As will be shown below, Pratibha Parmar constructs in the film a Scotland that is as flavourful as its titular culinary offerings.

44 

E. TORRICELLI

Case Study: Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006) Nina’s Heavenly Delights is a celebration of Scottish diversity. In it, Nina, a Scots-Indian lesbian played by Shelley Conn, has just returned home to Glasgow after the death of her father. Because he left behind gambling debts, the family restaurant is now being managed by Nina’s former classmate Lisa (Laura Fraser) and there are plans to sell it to Raj, her father’s chief competitor and father of Nina’s male ex-fiancé. Nina decides to enter a curry cooking competition to carry on her father’s legacy and, hopefully, make the sale of the restaurant more profitable. Nina and Lisa become more and more attracted to each other as they practice cooking their dishes for the televised finals. Nina, though, worries what her family will think should they find out about the relationship; only her gay, gender-defying friend Bobbi knows of her sexual orientation. However, Nina isn’t the only one in the family with a secret: her sister competes at Highland dancing, her brother is married to a white woman, and her mother has long been in love with Raj. Inspired by these admissions, Nina comes out and reveals her relationship with Lisa at the finals. The film, which was partially financed by Scottish Screen, was written by Scottish screenwriter Andrea Gibb, who had previously written Dear Frankie, and was directed by documentary filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, who was born in Kenya’s diasporic Asian community and moved to England as a child. Parmar’s interest in the identity play that is so pervasive in the film came out of her experience as a lesbian of colour (Whitehead 2008: 59). In addition, Nina’s Heavenly Delights was made at a time during which the Scottish Parliament granted more rights to LGBTQ individuals. Thus the film’s production reveals its attitude towards diversity at the same time it reflects changing Scottish attitudes towards sexuality. The film’s genre play also reflects its hybrid understanding of Scottish identity. As a romantic comedy, one can understand it in the general context of British films like Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003). Some film critics like Geoffrey Macnab (2006: 74, 76) also see it as part of a tradition of Scottish comedy films exemplified by Bill Forsyth’s Glaswegian films. There are also explicit nods to Bollywood cinema, including clips from Bollywood films, Bobbi’s performance of a dance routine from a well-known film, and the film’s closing musical number. This places Nina’s Heavenly Delights in the context of a type of Indian cinema with a wide global audience while at the same time placing it in the context of British-Asian films—which also frequently refer to Bollywood—especially the female-centric films of Gurinder Chadha like Bhaji on the Beach (1994), Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). Furthermore, these references to Bollywood cinema serve as an example of Said’s Orientalism, as they seem to use familiar, stereotypical images to exoticise

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

45

Indian culture for Western audiences. However, the specificity of these references might be missed by a Western audience; here the film speaks to the diasporic community, adding new levels of meaning to these references and thereby complicating their postcolonial reading. Nina’s Heavenly Delights offers a positive view of race in Scotland. For David Martin-Jones (2009: 80), it “constructs a fantasy Glasgow in which all crossor intercultural desires are not only permitted, but also provide the recipe for financial success”. Similarly, according to Jonathan Murray (2015: 122): “Nina’s… utopian worldview involves the film’s celebratory depiction of Glasgow/Scotland as an increasingly multicultural society. Immigrant Indian influences are understood to have augmented the native culture into which they have settled”. In addition, its “untrammelled multicultural optimism also leads the film to argue that Indian characters and culture have benefitted from the influence of the Scottish social sphere which they have relocated themselves within” (Murray 2015: 122). For Murray, the film’s alternatives to patriarchal structures are unsuccessful, but the diversity the film offers is still a positive formation of a hybrid Scottish identity. For example, there are three couples—one gay male, one lesbian and one heterosexual—formed in the film, all of which are racially mixed. Nina’s sister-­ in-­law appropriates her husband’s culture by wearing a sari to the competition finals, and Nina’s sister embraces ‘traditional’ Scottish identity through her Highland dancing, which is accompanied by tartan and bagpipe music. Bobbi’s dance troupe the Chutney Queens is the clearest example of the way the film blends its cultures. The troupe is a racial mix of both white and Asian dancers; they rehearse their Bollywood-style dancing to Western pop music. The Chutney Queens’ performance costumes are a good example of this cultural blending. The backing dancers wear shiny pink kilts in a fabric more typically seen in Indian garments. Bobbi’s kilt, though, is made of leather and is circled by a studded belt, alluding to LGBTQ subcultures. The Chutney Queens therefore are a hybrid of white Scottish, Indian and queer culture that ties together racial, national and gender identities (see Fig. 3.1). However, for Churnjeet Mahn (2013: 326), “the mobilization of stereotypes about Scotland and a vision of Scottish national identity is used to erase the traces of friction between traditional, or normative, and non-normative sexualities”. Even though Nina’s Heavenly Delights’s sense of inclusivity overshadows the disruptive possibilities of Nina’s sexuality (Mahn 2013: 324), ultimately it “lay[s] foundations for a productive subject identity that marks the film out against the prevailing trends in contemporary films and critical discussions of female same-sex desire in the South Asian diaspora” (Mahn 2013: 326). In offering so many identities—racial, gendered and sexual—it would appear that Nina’s Heavenly Delights weakens any sense of a unifying Scottish identity. All of these identities, though, can be understood in a national framework. According to Daniela Berghahn (2011: 130), “the theme of

46 

E. TORRICELLI

Fig. 3.1  The Chutney Queens’ performance costumes in Nina’s Heavenly Delights

‘coming out’ in the diasporic family articulates a critique of fantasies of purity, which simultaneously underpin certain traditional models of the family (based on bloodline and descent, gender hierarchies and heteronormativity) and nationalist ideologies (based on ethnic absolutism and other essentialising concepts)”. Therefore, Nina and Lisa’s relationship’s acceptance by her family is symbolic of other racial identities being accepted into a Scottish national identity (Berghahn 2011: 141). Rather than acting in a fragmentary manner, Nina’s sexuality supports the film’s construction of a hybrid Scottish national identity. Finally, Nina’s Heavenly Delights uses cooking as a metaphor to support its approach to identity. The film places a great deal of symbolic value on food. During the preparation for the curry competition, Parmar uses montages in which there are dissolves between Nina’s father’s written recipes and dishes cooking on the stove. For example, the words ‘garam masala’ float off the recipe book to hover over the simmering pot before slowly, starting with the bottom loop of the ‘g’, melting into the curry. As with Nina’s curries, which are a blend of distinct ingredients, Scotland as constructed in Nina’s Heavenly Delights contains a variety of identities that, though differentiated by race, gender, sexuality and so on, come together to make up the nation (see Fig. 3.2). To extend the metaphor, cooking permanently changes the ingredients and transforms them into the curry. Likewise, as Bhabha suggests, the nation is transformed by the hybridity of diasporic communities and other marginalised groups.

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

47

Fig. 3.2  Written ingredients dissolve into curry in Nina’s Heavenly Delights

Conclusion Throughout the history of Scottish cinema, one can see a significant broadening of the concept of what it means to be Scottish. In the 1980s, rather than simply moving away from the ‘traditional’ representations of Scotland that could be seen in dominant cinemas, directors like Bill Forsyth constructed a Scotland that was inclusive of both the traditional and the contemporary. Films from the 1990s offered multiple versions of Scottish masculinity, though they still constructed Scotland as a predominantly white male space. The films of the next decade shifted away from this to offer hybrid Scottish identities that were inclusive of other races, ethnicities, genders and sexualities. And this trend seems to have continued into the 2010s. Under the Skin (2013), for example, considers the outsider experience of what is arguably a female-presenting non-­ binary gendered protagonist. Rather than a negation of the concept of the national, one can see this diversity as a reaffirmation of it in the way it redefines Scotland to make it inclusive of other identities. For Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer (1988: 2): One issue at stake, we suggest, is the potential break-up or deconstruction of structures that determine what is regarded as culturally central and what is regarded as culturally marginal. Ethnicity has emerged as a key issue as various ‘marginal’ practices […] are becoming de-marginalised at a time when ‘centred’ discourses of cultural authority and legitimations […] are becoming increasingly de-centred and destabilised, called into question from within.

The described breakdown of binary relationships—centre/margin, black/ white and so on—deconstructs the belief that ethnicity is reserved for the

48 

E. TORRICELLI

Other; whiteness is not homogeneous and is in fact comprised of different ethnic identities (Julien and Mercer 1988: 5–6). In this way, the cinematic engagement with the racial, ethnic, gendered or sexual Other undercuts the idea of a stable, homogeneous nation and reveals national identities to be already hybrid.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. In what ways does diversity complicate the concept of a national identity? How might it support it? 2. How do you define national cinema? Is it still a valid concept? Why or why not? 3. In addition to the national or transnational, films can be classified as regional, international, global and so on. What are the advantages of using such categories? What are the disadvantages? Can you think of other ways to categorise films? What are their advantages and disadvantages? 4. Why are films labelled by nation, genre, style, authorship and so on? What is the importance of labelling films to film studies as an academic field? To film industries? To consumers?

References Berghahn, Daniela. 2011. Queering the Family of Nation: Reassessing Fantasies of Purity, Celebrating Hybridity in Diasporic Cinema. Transnational Cinemas 2 (2): 129–146. Bhabha, Homi. 1998. The location of culture (1994). In Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 936–944. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Caughie, John. 1990. Representing Scotland: New Questions for Scottish Cinema. In From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, ed. Eddie Dick, 13–30. London: BFI. Craig, Cairns. 1982. Myths Against History: Tartanry and Kailyard in 19th-Century Scottish Literature. In Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, ed. Colin McArthur, 7–15. London: BFI. ———. 1996. Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture. Edinburgh: Polygon. The Electoral Commission (UK). 2019. Results and Turnout at the EU Referendum. https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/electionsand-referendums/past-elections-and-referendums/eu-referendum/results-andturnout-eu-referendum. Accessed 12 November 2019. Goode, Ian. 2007. Different Trajectories: Europe and Scotland in Recent Scottish Cinema. PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4 (2): 1–11. Hechter, Michael. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Higson, Andrew. 2000. The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema. In Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 63–74. London: Routledge.

3  SCOTLAND’S ONSCREEN IDENTITIES: OTHERNESS AND HYBRIDITY… 

49

Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. 1988. Introduction: De Margin and De Centre. Screen 29 (4): 2–11. Macnab, Geoffrey. 2006. Reviews: Films: Nina’s Heavenly Delights. Sight & Sound 16 (10): 74, 76. Mahn, Churnjeet. 2013. The Queer Limits of Pratibha Parmar’s Nina’s Heavenly Delights. Journal of Lesbian Studies 17 (3–4): 317–328. Martin-Jones, David. 2009. Scotland: Global Cinema Genres, Modes and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McArthur, Colin. 1982. Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers. In Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, ed. Colin McArthur, 40–69. London: BFI. McCrone, David. 2001. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Murray, Jonathan. 2007. Scotland. In The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, 76–92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2015. The New Scottish Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris. Nairn, Tom. 1981. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso. Petrie, Duncan. 2000. Screening Scotland. London: BFI. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schlessinger, Philip. 1990. Scotland, Europe and identity. In From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, ed. Eddie Dick, 221–232. London: BFI. Torricelli, Emily. 2017. Multicultural Glasgow: Imagining Scotland as a Space of Cultural Intersection in Scots-Asian Films of the 2000s. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 13 (5): 90–104. ———. 2018. Digital Places, Feminine Spaces: Scotland Re-gendered in Twenty-First Century Film. Frames Cinema Journal 14: 1–17. Whitehead, Tamsin. 2008. Rejecting the Margins of Difference: Strategies of Resistance in the Documentaries of Pratibha Parmar. thirdspace 7 (2): 58–67.

CHAPTER 4

Questioning the ‘Normality Drama’: The Representation of Disability in Contemporary European Films Eleanor Andrews

Definitions Disability The term ‘disability’ refers to a bodily condition or function which restricts a person’s capacity to perform the activities of everyday life deemed to be regular. It may be a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses or activities, and it may be temporary, like a broken leg, or permanent like blindness. Normality Genre The normality drama focuses on the life and experiences of a disabled protagonist, with its own set of genre conventions. The filmic depiction of the disabled character underpins the representation of normality. The main theme is not the disability, but the degree to which it can either define or validate its opposite: normality. This normality is portrayed either through the contrast with able-­ bodied characters or by the rejection of the impaired body by the disabled character.

E. Andrews (*) University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_4

51

52 

E. ANDREWS

Stereotype A stereotype is a frequently oversimplified image or idea of a person or thing. Stereotyping reduces people to a few, straightforward, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed. Stereotypes can be used in a negative way in the media, for example, using terms such as ‘asylum seekers’ to produce a shortcut for communication and information purposes. Stereotyping reduces, essentialises, naturalises and fixes ‘difference’ and often occurs where there are inequalities of power. Theories of Comedy There are several well-established theories of humour: (1) incongruity or inappropriate, illogical juxtapositions, which are recognised and understood by the audience or reader (Raskin 2008, passim); (2) feelings of superiority sometimes combined with Schadenfreude (Morreall 2008: 211–220); (3) release where laughter allows the diffusion of built-up tension (Freud 1976 [1905]); (4) pattern recognition theory, which suggests that comedy works on the principle of repetition and surprise (Clarke 2008).

Introduction In film and television, even in the twenty-first century and in Europe, disability is frequently under- or misrepresented. There is often an absence of people with any impairment, visible or invisible, in everyday situations. When they do appear, these individuals are seldom shown as integral and productive members of society, and the focus is on their impairments, not on their skills or personalities. They are regularly depicted as incapable of fully participating in everyday life. Michael Oliver (1990: 61) argues that in film and television “disabled people continue to be portrayed as more than or less than human, rarely as ordinary people doing ordinary things”. Martin F.  Norden (1994: 1) notes that, “most movies have tended to isolate disabled characters from their able-­ bodied peers as well as from each other”. However, despite this absence and/ or misrepresentation, in recent years, scholars in disability studies and film studies have demonstrated a heightened interest in the discourse on films about people with impairments, including works by Brylla and Hughes (2016); Chivers and Markotić (2010); Fraser (2013), (2016); Markotić (2016); Marr (2013); Mogk (2013); Wilde (2016). This chapter focuses on three European films which have as their theme the life of a physically disabled character: The Sea Inside (2004), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and Untouchable (2011). The discourse of disability in these films does not focus on the person with an impairment in any stereotypical role of villain, object of ridicule, victim or monster, which is discussed later in the chapter. Rather, they follow a trajectory which will be examined in relation to Paul Darke’s (1998) notion of the normality drama. The rationale

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

53

for choosing these particular films from those that address other infirmities, such as blindness or deafness, was a degree of similarity in the basic elements of the films. In these works, all three protagonists are male and quadriplegic, two through an accident and one through a stroke. All three have true-life narratives where, to some extent, the disabled person manages to achieve a goal in life despite their many difficulties and succeed either in romance or in publication of literary works.

Disability The term ‘disability’ refers to the functional limitation of the individual caused by physical, mental or sensory impairment, and handicap is the loss or limitation of opportunities to take part in the normal life of the community on an equal level with others due to physical or social barriers (Abidi et al. 2012). Paul Hunt (1998: 8) considers that “the problem with disability lies not only in the impairment of function and its effects on us individually, but also more importantly, in the area of our relationship with ‘normal’ people”. Representations of individuals in the discourse of disability in film are frequently based on a medical model of disability, where the impairment is seen as an illness of an individual person, to be conquered or eliminated. Richard Rieser (2004: 19) argues, “the ‘medical model’ sees disabled people as the problem. They need to be adapted to fit into the world as it is”. Films on disability often have the setting of a hospital or medical environment. This medical model contrasts with the social model of disability (Oliver 1983) where all disabled people have the right to belong to and be valued in their local community. Rieser (21) comments that “using this model, you start by looking at the strengths of the person with the impairment and at the physical and social barriers that obstruct them at school, college, home or work”. Where the medical model sees disabled people as passive receivers of services aimed at cure or management, the social model considers them as active fighters for equality working in partnership with allies.

Normality Drama The term normality drama was coined by Darke to describe a film genre which focuses on the life and experiences of a disabled protagonist. Darke (1998: 192–196) bases his theory on the earlier work of Rick Altman (1987) on the Hollywood musical. Darke (184) argues that this genre “uses abnormal— impaired—characters to deal with a perceived threat to the dominant social hegemony of normality”. He suggests that the normality drama has its own set of genre conventions, with the filmic depiction of the disabled character used to underpin the representation of normality. This normality is portrayed either through the able-bodied characters or by denial, by the character with disabilities, of their disabled body. Unlike the classic narrative structure suggested by Tzvetan Todorov (1977: 45), where the plot begins in a state of equilibrium,

54 

E. ANDREWS

goes through a disruption and then returns by the end of the narrative, through a series of events, to a new equilibrium, the normality drama often begins in a situation of confusion and instability. Nevertheless, it follows a similar narrative arc, so that, by its completion, there is some degree of restoration of stability. This denouement, Darke (184) implies, provides a satisfying and straightforward solution “to the highly complex social ‘problem’ of abnormality and disability”. The conclusion may end positively, where the disabled character is normalised into society by success in the public sphere or marriage, or in a more serious and negative narrative, the work ends in suicide or death. The narrative is firmly placed in a medical, rather than a social, model of disability, thus reinforcing and reaffirming the assumed dominance of normality in society. Darke (187) justifies his designation normality drama genre rather than disability genre because he states that “the central theme is not the impairment or the abnormality but the degree to which it can either define or validate its opposite: normality”.

Freak Shows In the era before the cinema, the public was fascinated by outward physical manifestations of inward wickedness, often associated with ugliness, deformity and scars (Browne 1963; Lombroso 2006; Wright 2013). This led to the nineteenth-­century interest in so-called freak shows which had developed from the practice of displaying unusual people such as bearded ladies, conjoined twins, armless and legless individuals, giants, dwarfs and other physical anomalies in hostelries and in the street. Lisa Holden and Fran Pheasant-Kelly (2016: 197) suggest a link between the public attraction to these Victorian ‘freak’ shows and the way the cinema audience is captivated by films where, for example, the villain has a facial disfigurement, creating what they call a ‘freak-­show aesthetic’.

Stereotypes A stereotype is an often widely held but fixed and frequently oversimplified image or idea of a person or thing. Stereotyping reduces people to a few, straightforward, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by nature (Hall 1997: 257). Traditionally, there are several discernible stereotypes of people with disabilities in film (Longmore 2003; Norden 1994). Joseph Merrick (John Hurt) in The Elephant Man (1980) is an example of a sweet, innocent and conceivably pathetic character. Occasionally, the disabled individual may be involved in a miracle cure and will be returned to an able-bodied state, leading to a positive happy ending, such as The Light that Came (1909) where a blind entertainer has his sight restored after an operation. Lauri E. Klobas (1988: xii–xiii) notes that this optimistic type of film about the disabled became the benchmark for decades. This narrative arc is depicted in the Italian film, Salvo (2013). The title character (Saleh Bakri) is a bodyguard and hitman for a Mafia boss (Mario Pupella). While searching for an enemy

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

55

mafioso, he meets the rival’s blind sister, Rita (Sara Serraiocco), whose sight gradually begins to return after Salvo inexplicably spares her from assassination. An undefeated character like Rita may be termed a ‘Super-Crip’ in a narrative of triumph over tragedy. This can also be found in the French film In Harmony (2015) where horse trainer and stuntman Marc Guermont (Albert Dupontel) is badly injured and becomes paraplegic, but by the end of the narrative has learnt to ride again. Another stereotype of disablement is the victim or object of violence, for example, paraplegic, Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford), who is tortured by her former child star sister, Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) in Wait Until Dark (1967), who is a recently blinded woman pursued by criminals. Some disabled characters are depicted as sinister or evil, and this is examined by Holden and Pheasant-Kelly (2016) in films such as Casino Royale (2006), The Dark Knight (2008) and Skyfall (2012). The disabled person may be laughable or the target of jokes as with the lead (Tom Hanks) in Forrest Gump (1994), or a vengeful personage with a grievance to pursue, such as Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) in Hook (1991). Sometimes the person with disability is considered as “the ‘Saintly Sage’, a pious older person with a disability (almost always blindness) who serves as a voice of reason and conscience in a chaotic world” (Norden 1994: 131), for instance, the blind hermit (O.  P. Heggie) in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Generally, the disabled character is portrayed as non-sexual (Klobas 1988: 115) or incapable of forming a worthwhile relationship, for example, the Vietnam War veteran, Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). More recent films, however, have countered this stereotype, in particular, the Spanish documentary, Yes, we f∗∗k (2015), which explores the sexuality of people with disabilities through six different narratives. The film uses explicit sexual images to disrupt the dominant perception of people with impairments that fixes them in a permanent state of infantilisation. Away from these more traditional examples, a number of European films featuring disabled characters are black comedies involving two or more friends. In the Franco-Belgian production Aaltra (2004), two rivals become impaired, following a horrendous farm accident, and collaborate to get compensation. In the Italian film Infelici e contenti (1992), a blind man and a wheelchair user join forces for fraudulent purposes. The Belgian road comedy, Come as You Are (2011) has three disabled protagonists: Jozef, who is partially sighted; Philip, a paraplegic; and Lars, a wheelchair user. They travel to Spain, desperately longing for a coming-­ of-­age experience and an end to their virginity.

“Based on a True Story” Each of the main films under discussion here is based on a factual account. This is considered to give authenticity and a degree of authority to the film. There are many such films which use supposed biographical legitimacy, the so-called

56 

E. ANDREWS

bio-pic, where the words “based on a true story” are emblazoned on promotional material, although the validity of the depiction is questioned by some scholars (George F. Custen 1992). The Spanish film, The Sea Inside, tells the story of a quadriplegic man and is based on the real-life account of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), who wants to end his life through assisted suicide. His quadriplegia is the result of a diving accident in his 20s. The protagonist has been disabled for nearly 30 years at the start of the narrative and is involved in a campaign in support of euthanasia and the right to end life. In the film, it is Ramón’s friend Rosa (Lola Dueñas) who helps him to commit suicide. In real life, Ramón died in 1998 from potassium cyanide poisoning; several days later, his close friend, Ramona Maneiro (Rosa in the film), was arrested and charged with assisting his suicide but released due to lack of evidence. The French film, Untouchable, is inspired by a true story of the encounter between wealthy aristocrat Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, a quadriplegic, and a young North-African man named Abdel Sellou. Pozzo di Borgo and Sellou are seen at the end of the production, adding to the notion of authenticity. In a scene near the start of Untouchable, the new carer, in the film called Bakary ‘Driss’ Bassari (Omar Sy), takes a call on a mobile phone for his employer, Philippe (François Cluzet). The location is a stylish room in Philippe’s Paris home, where silver candelabra are placed on the mantelpiece, together with Fabergé eggs, a visual reminder of the egg which Driss earlier stole for his aunt. This locality and the props reinforce the social, rather than the physical, difference between the two characters. On the right-hand side, Philippe is sitting reading in a setting where the iconography of the disabled person (the wheelchair, the mouth-held pointer) is very clear to the audience. Driss sits on the left-hand side of the frame, engrossed in his own concerns. His gaze is downwards, focused on his MP3 player. He is seated in a normal armchair positioned lower than Philippe to connote his subordinate status as an employee. In his outstretched left hand, he is proffering a phone towards Philippe who is looking back at him with resignation on his face. This unreflective act of casually passing the device to his employer, oblivious of the fact that, as a quadriplegic, Philippe is unable to take the apparatus from him, reinforces the attitude that Driss has towards Philippe. Driss does not see him as a poor invalid who needs to be helped every step of the way (“I keep forgetting”), but as another man dealing with his own set of problems (see Fig. 4.1). This aspect of Driss’s personality is one of the traits that Philippe likes about him. Philippe later tells a friend, Antoine (Grégoire Oestermann), that Driss is the only person who does not treat him with pity or compassion, but as an equal. As the film proceeds, Driss becomes more aware of the problems faced by a quadriplegic as he cares for Philippe, but he continues to take this normative stance, which no others who surround Philippe are able to do.

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

57

Fig. 4.1  Driss handing over the mobile phone in Untouchable

Mise-en-scène and Cinematography The main setting for The Sea Inside is Ramón’s bedroom within the farmhouse where he lives with his family in north-west Spain. The rugged landscape of Galicia frequently features connoting tradition and tenacity, while the solid ties seen in the family characters surrounding Ramón are resonant of the strength of the bonds of Spanish domestic life. Despite the fact that Ramón cannot see the ocean from his room, the beach features powerfully in his memory and fantasy world. Nursing equipment, as well as a wheelchair and adapted transport are shown, giving the narrative an overall medical rather than social perspective to the disability, but this is countered by the ethical discussions which permeate the dialogue concerning Ramón’s desire to die at a time of his own choosing—Ramón’s family is important, not only in the day-to-day caring for the protagonist but also in their part in the debate about euthanasia. Close-ups of their weathered faces are set against the Galician landscape. Joaquín Sampedro (Joan Dalmau), Ramón’s father, voices his dismay at Ramón’s desired prospects, “There’s only one thing worse than having your son die before you… it’s him wanting to”. His brother, José (Celso Bugallo) is angrier, as it becomes clear that he has had to give up his fishing business to look after Ramón. Ramón’s main carer and sister-in law, Manuela (Mabel Rivera), is a strong woman who is keeping the family together. She is careworn, but gentle and loving with him, her eyes shown as ever alert to his needs, her ears always open to his requests. Ramón’s resourceful nephew, Javier (Tamar Novas), is the son he never had, and Ramón’s poem “To My Son” is dedicated to him. These able-bodied helpers of three generations could be argued to be the normalising element against which Ramón’s disability can be measured. None of them want

58 

E. ANDREWS

him to die, and none of them can understand his reasons for wanting to go because, for them, he is part of their daily lives, and their interaction with him gives their lives purpose. Surely, this should be the same for him? The mise-en-scène of Untouchable has no scenes in a hospital setting, and although there is medical equipment in Philippe’s bedroom with a wheelchair and adapted transport, the rest of the décor in his house is elegant and luxurious. There is also a great dissimilarity between Driss’s home in the outskirts of Paris, the Banlieue, and Philippe’s opulent house. The Banlieue has become a synonym for the racial other. This space embodies the stereotypes of working-­ class immigrants, typically of Middle Eastern and North-African descent, who are regarded as aimless delinquents at best, and imminent terrorists at worst. In the cramped flat, which Driss shares with his aunt, several small children and two teenagers, the cinematography is close and claustrophobic. The disparity between his home and Philippe’s house is seen, in particular, in the bathrooms. In the flat, the tiny bathroom has only a half-sized bath, while a washing machine is squeezed into a corner. Driss has no privacy here, and other family members enter this area while he is in the bath, brushing their teeth and crowding the space with their noisy ablutions (see Fig. 4.2). Driss angrily leaves the bathtub wearing a vivid green towel, in a maelstrom of noise and confusion. Later, this restricted area is contrasted to the sumptuous bathroom that Driss has as Philippe’s employee. There is a look of amazement on Driss’s face when this spacious area, with its peaceful atmosphere, is slowly revealed, almost in the style of a hotel advertisement, to the sound of Franz Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’. A free-standing bath is positioned under a crystal chandelier in the middle of a sparkling pastel-coloured bathroom, with white towels and

Fig. 4.2  The cramped bathroom in the Banlieue

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

59

expensive-­looking products tastefully placed around on glass tables. Philippe’s personal assistant, Yvonne (Anne Le Ny), announces to Driss that this is the exclusive en-suite to his room. The contrast in the mise-en-scène of these two sequences, juxtaposing restriction with openness, public use with privacy, shabbiness with good taste, lurid colours with neutral shades, again underlines the sharp distinctions between the social conditions, but not the physical ability of the two men. Scenes in the Banlieue are frequently shot at night, with a dark or grey colour palette, reminiscent of Hate (1995), with all the racial and social tensions implied by comparison with that film. On the other hand, Philippe’s house is full of light, lustre, colour and valuable artworks. The cinematography is also different in the two locations. In the Banlieue, there is considerable use of a handheld camera, with many close-ups, in particular, of Driss, giving a tense, unsentimental feel to the scenes. In contrast, the beautiful interiors in Philippe’s home are displayed through camerawork similar to a heritage film, where the camera style is painterly, often with slightly high-angled shots, not taken from a character point of view, and with an engaging mise-en-scène. Many shots, taken from Driss’s point of view, are through glass and windows, using these as a transparent barrier where he can see Philippe, but he is not close to him. These sequences, especially towards the end of the film, give a sense of Philippe’s entrapment. Driss is free on the outside, while Philippe is confined behind the glass, both in his disabled body and in his depression. The seasons clearly change on the screen from winter to spring, connoting the thawing of Philippe’s personality and the warming of the atmosphere in his household once Driss is there.

Music The music used in The Sea Inside emphasises the European nature of the works, featuring many well-known pieces. The classical soundtrack is not only an indication of Ramón’s cultured persona, it is also appropriate to the particular moment in the narrative and features stories of love and betrayal. These include the ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’ from Beethoven’s Fidelio, “May the wind be gentle” from Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and “None shall sleep” from Puccini’s Turandot. The main element that the protagonists of Untouchable share is their love of music, although of different types, Philippe enjoying classical music, while Driss prefers a contemporary style. This difference in musical taste becomes most noticeable in Philippe’s birthday party sequence. At the end of a chamber concert, Philippe asks the musicians to play some well-known pieces of European music, including from ‘The Four Seasons’ by Antonio Vivaldi. As an example of cultural diffusion, Driss reacts to these pieces by commenting that they are used in official situations, such as putting a customer ‘on hold’ on the telephone. To share his own preference in music, Driss then plays ‘Boogie Wonderland’ by Earth Wind and Fire and dances, while encouraging the others

60 

E. ANDREWS

at the party to join in. His captivating moves engage everyone but also emphasise his mobility in contrast to Philippe’s stillness. The choice of this American music over Francophone hip-hop is one way of widening the film’s appeal beyond French-speaking countries. However, mostly, in this film, music is used as a definer of class and not the state of physical ability of an individual. By the end of the film, there has been an exchange; Driss has found classical music, while Philippe now enjoys more contemporary songs.

Narrative Structure The narrative structure of The Sea Inside is linear, starting in the present with Ramón discussing the campaign about the right to die with dignity with his friend, the activist Gené (Clara Segura). This is interspersed with several flashbacks to the moment of the accident as well as two fantasy sequences. In the first, Ramón seems to leave his bed and fly across the countryside, meeting his lawyer, Julia (Belén Rueda), on the beach and kissing her. As with dreams about flying, this fantasy liberates and empowers Ramón, returning him to the physically strong, actively sensual man that he was before his accident. In a later scene, he appears to get out of bed and moves to smell, touch and kiss Julia. This time, however, the scene ends with a morph into a real kiss between the two characters, showing a progression in their relationship. Flashbacks to the moment of the accident occur three times, with ominous, indistinct images from beneath Ramón who is lying face down in the water, in a near-death situation. The repetition of this scene, using the same cinematography and mise-en-scène of the almost lifeless body of Ramón floating in the water, could arguably be seen as a representation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is suggested by doctors and scholars that PTSD is caused by a response, sometimes delayed, to an unpredictable, overwhelming and potentially catastrophic event. This may take the form of recurring, disturbing fantasies, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event (Caruth 1995: 4). Matthew Marr (2013) has a different, but compelling, rationalisation of Ramón’s emotional behaviour, suggesting that Ramón has bipolar disorder. He argues: … what has been overlooked is the more subtle spotlight Amenábar’s much-­ debated film places on the quiet tyranny of undiagnosed mental illness: a threat to authentic individual autonomy within any society, but especially in a setting like the Galician countryside of this film, where public awareness of mental health resources remains under-developed, and an Iberian-Catholic ideal of emotional stoicism remains highly ingrained in relation to paradigms of masculinity. (97)

The protagonist of Untouchable is also male and quadriplegic as the result of a paragliding accident. This sudden turn of events takes place long before the start of the film, and there is no visual flashback, the details being given only in the dialogue. The narrative starts with a high-speed car chase with Driss and Philippe being pursued by the police. They are eventually surrounded, and

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

61

Driss claims that Philippe must be urgently driven to the intensive care unit. Philippe fakes a seizure and the deceived police officers guide them to the hospital. This opening may confuse the audience as to the film’s genre, suggesting a gangster movie or a thriller. Once the characters have been established, Philippe as a person with a disability, who has a sense of humour and likes a gamble, Driss as a risk-taker who can think quickly to resolve a difficult situation, the film has a long linear flashback to the start of Driss and Philippe’s relationship. At the point when this story catches up with the opening, which is briefly shown again, the film moves towards its conclusion. In addition to the themes of disability, class and race, Untouchable is a comedy, involving the spiritual restoration and healing of both leading characters and some of the minor ones. There are several well-established humour theories. Incongruity theory (Raskin 2008) emphasises inappropriate, illogical juxtapositions, which are recognised and understood by the audience or reader. Release theory (Freud 1976 [1905]) maintains that laughter is a mechanism which reduces psychological tension. The superiority theory of humour, sometimes combined with Schadenfreude (Morreall 2008: 211–220), traces back to Aristotle (1997: 5) who argued that we laugh at inferior or ugly individuals because we feel joy at being superior to them. Pattern recognition theory (Clarke 2008) suggests that one aspect of comedy works on the principle of repetition and another on surprise. In Untouchable, the main source of the humour is incongruity, where events are contrasted in an anomalous way. For instance, Driss’s anti-authoritarian approach in Philippe’s cheerless house is refreshing. Occasionally, the humour is in a taboo and crude vein and reveals a superiority slant. Thus, the audience feels both uncomfortable and disdainful, when Driss is told, in a convoluted way, that he has to perform some very intimate actions concerning Philippe’s bodily functions. Repetition in some scenes is also a basis for humour, so the audience experiences the various interviews, the trying on of different styles of clothing before the first meeting with Eléonore (Dorothée Brière), the contrasting encounters with the owner of the incorrectly parked car and the trimming of Philippe’s moustaches into various shapes.

The Discourse of Disabled Sexuality A sequence in The Sea Inside shows a series of still photos of Ramón’s travels all over the world when young, featuring many different attractive women and revealing him as a ‘ladies’ man’. Despite his later situation, where the discourse of disability stereotype might portray the disabled character as incapable of forming a meaningful relationship, in this film, two very different women fall in love with the protagonist. The first is Julia, the lawyer engaged to put his point of view in the courts. She is a happily married woman with a devoted husband, Germán (Alberto Jiménez). It is Julia who discovers Ramón’s poetry and manages to get it published. She partly understands his standpoint, since she is also disabled with CADASIL syndrome and faces a bleak future with this degenerative disease, precipitating strokes and progressing towards the

62 

E. ANDREWS

dementia which the audience witnesses at the end of the film. The other woman is Rosa, a working-class factory worker and single mother, who visits Ramón out of curiosity and falls for him because he is straight talking and kind, whereas many of her partners have been cruel or even violent. In Untouchable, sexuality and pleasure are part of the connection between the two men. Driss discovers that Philippe can still experience sensual gratification through having his ears massaged, and brings in a masseuse for this purpose, while employing another for his own needs. Driss is the driving force behind contacting Philippe’s penfriend, Eléonore, and thrusts Philippe into the romantic encounter at the end of the film. The film has an epilogue stating that the real-life Philippe married and had children, which runs contrary to the stereotype of the disabled person as non-sexual or incapable of forming a significant relationship. Gender and sexuality stereotypes are seen in the character of Magalie, a very attractive woman with whom Driss tries to flirt throughout the film. However, at the end, it is revealed that she is a lesbian, in a relationship with a woman known as Fréd(erique). Driss has a conventional reaction to this information, being surprised at the facts of the situation, confused by this image of a gay woman and then embarrassed by his own behaviour both before and after the reveal.

Case Study: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007) The French film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a biographical drama taken mainly from the point of view of protagonist, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a French actor, author and journalist, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, had a stroke. Diagnosed with the extremely rare condition, ‘locked­in syndrome’, he was left completely paralysed and unable to breathe, swallow or speak, but he was capable of understanding what was being said to him and what was happening around him. The only part of his body he had any control over was his left eyelid, which he could blink, and this became his only form of communication. Although based on a true story, there were numerous and controversial changes between what happened in real life and what is presented in the film. The adapter, Ronald Harwood, based his screenplay on Bauby’s memoirs and accounts by Bauby’s erstwhile partner and mother of his children, Sylvie de la Rochefoucauld (called Céline Desmoulins in the film and played by Emmanuelle Seigner), but made minor factual alterations, notably about the number of children the couple had—two in real life, but three on screen. Harwood felt that any changes that he made between the book and the film did not change the meaning or spirit of Bauby’s life. He added: I took what she [de la Rochefoucauld] told me as gospel. […] I don’t believe in research. You have to tell a story in a movie. Sometimes the facts disturb all that. I was asked to adapt, and that was what I decided to do. (Arnold 2008)

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

63

However, friends and close family of Bauby criticised the film, especially the emphasis on the ex-partner’s saintly devotion to the patient, compared with the seeming indifference of Bauby’s mistress, Florence (called Inès in the film and played by Agathe de La Fontaine), which they claimed was, in fact, the reverse (Arnold 2008). As with the other two films, the onset of the disability is sudden. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins with the protagonist awaking from the post-stroke coma. Sights and sounds come in fragments, giving the viewer the sense of disorientation experienced by Bauby. Neither he, nor the audience, can comprehend what is happening. The point of view is very narrow, solely from the character’s perspective. It soon becomes clear to the character, the medical staff surrounding him and the audience that Bauby has lost the power of speech, as well as the ability to move. However, his thoughts, fears and opinions are heard by the audience through voice-over. For the first section of the film, the point of view continues to be the confined one of the protagonist. Visiting doctors, the medical team and friends are all reduced to close-up faces, bending over Bauby to be in his line of vision. He has no control of whether the window is left open or whether the television is tuned in to some inane show. In one disturbing scene, a surgeon decides to sew up his right eyelid to prevent infection. Again, this is experienced from Bauby’s perspective, the surgeon approaching the camera in close-up with the needle. Bauby’s voiced-over protestations and fears remain unheard, except by the audience. At this early stage in the film, the audience has no idea even of Bauby’s appearance. Later, the camera moves away from this very restricted outlook, and the audience encounters a wider angle of Bauby with members of his family, as well as therapists and doctors. With the help of his speech therapist, Sandrine Fichou, renamed in the film Henriette Durand (Marie-Josée Croze), Bauby learns to communicate by blinking, following a French-language frequency-­ ordered alphabet system. By this painstaking method, he manages to communicate with those around him and even succeeds in ‘dictating’ to ghostwriter Claude Mendibil (Anne Consigny), a book which is published shortly before his death. After the initial tight focus on the protagonist’s point of view, later shots including Bauby’s figure depict a distorted face and limbs. Further into the film, the scenes of Bauby with his family on the beach on Father’s Day display a wideness and freedom in the cinematography in contrast to the dismal entrapping hospital interiors, where he is often left alone with just the television for company. The location for the present and for much of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the Berck hospital in the northern French department of Pas-de-­ Calais and its environs. As in The Sea Inside, nursing equipment as well as a wheelchair are shown, giving the narrative an overall medical rather than social perspective to the disability. Although the hospital interior is visually universal, the flashback scenes show more recognisable French settings, in particular, in Paris and Lourdes. This is an example of what David Bass (1997: 93), in his article about Rome on film, describes as the ‘armchair tourism’ of the film

64 

E. ANDREWS

cartolina (‘postcard film’) such as William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953), where a fragmented visual version of the city is presented as validation of presence in the place and where editing creates a spatial ellipsis of all the highlights of a visit, which treats the city as a type of museum. The flashback sequence in Lourdes is triggered by a priest, suggesting a visit to the shrine where it is believed the sick can be healed. In the flashback, Bauby is spending time with his mistress, Inès. The sequence also has a postcard-like quality, but it contrasts the genuinely held beliefs of those visiting the place of pilgrimage with the trashy souvenirs which are on sale there. Ironically, his pre-stroke self observes with pity the many wheelchair users that he encounters in the town. This is an example of the normality drama, where there is a sharp contrast between the able bodied and the impaired, suggesting that only the fit and healthy can achieve goals in life. The title of both the book and the film comes from the two aspects that Bauby experiences in the ‘locked-in’ state: the diving bell and the butterfly. When he feels frustrated and restricted by his lack of speech and physical movement, images are seen of an old-fashioned, heavy diving suit, with a totally enclosed brass helmet. This cumbersome suit is submerged in the sea and is falling into the depths slowly, and out of control. His first full communication to Henriette is “I want to die”. In this discouraged, confined state of mind, he imagines his life parallel to that of his elderly father (Max von Sydow), whose lack of mobility traps him in his flat. With a sense of irony, there are flashbacks to Bauby helping his father as he himself will be helped after the stroke. He also compares himself to his friend, Pierre Roussin (Niels Arestrup), who was held captive in solitary confinement for four years in Beirut. Roussin attempts to encourage Bauby by telling him, “Hold fast to the human inside you, and you will survive”. He further relates to the fictional Noirtier de Villefort in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). This character is also in a wheelchair and uses blinking to communicate. Like the identifiable scenes in Paris, this introduction of a well-known novel intensifies the French cultural perspective of the film. During the diving bell sequences, not only does Bauby feel the anger and frustration of his current situation, he also reflects on all his past failures and disappointments. These bitter, destructive emotions are envisioned on screen by images of falling rocks, shattering at the base of a cliff. The end of the film shows a resolution of these sentiments, and a suggestion of a peaceful outcome to Bauby’s life, when the tumbling shards of the glacier are seen reforming in reverse filming. However, at other times, the creative part of him, with his undamaged intellect, realises that his imagination can soar out of his impaired body, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. This notion leads to a number of fantasy sequences—which also exist in the book. Rather than recalling events in his pre-­stroke body, Bauby realises that he can imagine anything, and so he fantasises about the actor Marlon Brando and visualises a huge meal of seafood. He also envisages the imperial visit on May 4, 1864 of Empress Eugenie, who was the patroness of the Maritime Hospital at Berck. Once again, this gives a

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

65

specifically French cultural reference to this episode. Freed from his disability, like an unconstrained butterfly on the wing, he imagines himself rising from his wheelchair to kiss the Empress who has come to see him. In this single scene we see both the cultivated and the sensual man who is locked into his failing body. This is a persuasive example of the normality drama where Bauby’s disabled present persona is juxtaposed to an idealised, romanticised version of himself. In certain places, the music heightens the butterfly-like sense of freedom that Bauby experiences in letting his mind wander at will. Two pieces in particular enrich the ending of the film. As the pre-stroke Bauby drives his new car around Paris, the shots are accompanied by Jean Constantin’s title music from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). In this latter film, Paris, and in particular the Eiffel Tower, is displayed in postcard style. As Bauby continues on his journey, the stroke hits him, and the soundtrack plays Charles Trenet’s La Mer. This quintessential French song is again redolent of Gallic culture, and its use recalls within the diegesis of the film, and foreshadows in the real story, happier times with the family on the beach. The narrative structure of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has a linear progression from Bauby’s post-stroke awakening to the publication of his book, with many flashbacks to earlier points in his life in a variety of locations, including photo shoots for Elle magazine, where he had been the editor, as well as the visit to Lourdes and scenes around Paris. Going against the frequently used stereotype of the non-sexual invalid, Bauby is surrounded by very attractive women during his illness, just as in his able-bodied life. Harwood got to know the real-life women as he wrote the screenplay. He said, “All the women were so good-looking […] All fell in love with him. They found him deeply attractive” (Arnold 2008). The death, which concludes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, although wished for by the protagonist, is not deliberately expedited, as in The Sea Inside, but it is a result of the many incapacities which Bauby had suffered.

Conclusion All three films examined in this chapter enjoyed great success at the box office throughout the world and received several awards.1 Although these films take place in two different countries, with film cartolina elements depicting their individual locations—the rugged landscape of Galicia, the famous sights of Paris, the austere Normandy sea coast—there is commonality here as well: the medicalised settings, which occur at some point in each film; the relative simplicity of the narrative structures and symbolism; the soundtracks’ use of music widely known throughout Europe. Ultimately, all three films have a universal appeal, seen through a European filter. The question this chapter sought to answer was the extent to which these contemporary European films deliver stereotypical representations of people with disabilities, following Paul Darke’s notion of the normality drama. Within

66 

E. ANDREWS

Darke’s definition, the quadriplegic protagonists in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Sea Inside reject their impaired body and, in both cases, wish for death. Both films feature the disabled person as the focus of pity in a medicalised setting and, in particular, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is filmed from the protagonist’s point of view. The films depict the able-bodied former self of the leading characters in flashback, and it is this normality which is longed for. This is manifested in these films when Bauby and Ramón fantasise about what they could do if their bodies returned to the state they were in before their trauma. These two films conform to Darke’s concept of the normality drama. Because of its comedic tone and the fact that it addresses issues other than disability, Untouchable differs from the other two films. One factor that renders this film as not being a normality drama is that the men learn from one another, instead of the one-way learning mode that occurs in many films about disability. Driss, for instance, shares a joint with his employer, which eases Philippe’s pain and makes him more relaxed. He has Philippe’s electric wheelchair modified, and insists on using the Maserati Quattroporte, so that Philippe can enjoy some of the speed which formerly thrilled him. For his part, Philippe introduces Driss to paragliding, and both men experience the powerful movement, which gives Philippe such a sense of freedom. At first, Philippe has a degree of superiority, since he was experienced in this form of sport, while Driss is very nervous and uncomfortable. However, by the end of the flight, the men are in a more equal situation. The development of Driss is as important as the evolution of Philippe, and their transfer of emotions, knowledge and skills is mutual. The film does not show Philippe wishing for death as an end to any anguish arising from his impairment. His comparison with the able-bodied Driss is balanced, since both men have talents, desires and preferences, which they exchange in the course of the narrative. Untouchable is therefore arguably not a normality drama.

Questions for Group Discussion . Apart from disability, what are the most important themes in Untouchable? 1 2. Discuss the positioning within the narrative and the significance of the fantasies in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? 3. Why is the choice of music so important in The Sea Inside? 4. To what extent could James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) be considered a film about disability? 5. Is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) just about voyeurism or is disability a key feature in this film? 6. Can you think of any other European films addressing disability that might be considered outside the category of the normality drama? 7. These three films have as their protagonists men with quadriplegia. How are other disabilities represented in film, for instance, blindness or deafness?

4  QUESTIONING THE ‘NORMALITY DRAMA’: THE REPRESENTATION… 

67

Note 1. For details see https://www.imdb.com/.

References Abidi, Javed, et  al. 2012. Disabled Peoples’ International. http://www.disabledpeoplesinternational.org. Accessed 22 August 2018. Altman, Rick. 1987. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Aristotle. 1997. Poetics, Trans. Samuel Henry Butcher. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc. Arnold, Beth. 2008. The Truth About “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. Salon. February 23. https://www.salon.com/2008/02/23/diving_bell_2/. Accessed 11 August 2018. Bass, David. 1997. Insiders and Outsiders: Latent Urban Thinking in Movies of Modern Rome. In Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, ed. François Penz and Maureen Thomas, 84–99. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Browne, Thomas. 1963 [1643]. In Religio Medici, ed. James Winny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brylla, Catalin, and Helen Hughes. 2016. Documentary and Disability. Colchester: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chivers, Sally, and Nicole Markotić. 2010. The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Clarke, Alastair. 2008. Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour: An Outline. Cumbria: Pyrrhic House. Custen, George F. 1992. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Darke, Paul. 1998. Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability. In The Disability Reader, ed. Tom Shakespeare, 181–197. London: Continuum. Dumas, Alexandre. [1884]; 1997. The Count of Monte Cristo. London: Wordsworth Editions. Fraser, Benjamin. 2013. Disability Studies and Spanish Culture. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———, ed. 2016. Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts. New York: Wallflower Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1976 [1905]. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Trans. James Strachy. London: Penguin. Hall, Stuart. 1997. The Spectacle of the ‘Other’. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, 223–290. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Holden, Lisa, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly. 2016. Freak-Show Aesthetics and the Politics of Disfigurement: Reconfiguring the Cinematic Terrorist in the Post 9/11 Era. In Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives in Literature, Television, Film and Theatre, ed. V. Bryan, A. Keeble, and H. Pope, 195–212. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Hunt, Paul. 1998. A Critical Condition. In The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Tom Shakespeare, 7–19. London: Continuum.

68 

E. ANDREWS

Klobas, Lauri E. 1988. Disability Drama in Television and Film. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers. Lombroso, Cesare. 2006. Criminal Man, Trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Longmore, Paul K. 2003. Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures. In Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, ed. Paul K. Longmore, 131–146. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Markotić, Nicole. 2016. Disability in Film and Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc. Marr, Matthew J. 2013. The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film: Plus Ultra Pluralism. New York: Routledge. Mogk, Marja Evelyn, ed. 2013. Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Morreall, John. 2008. Philosophy and Religion. In The Primer of Humor Research, ed. Victor Raskin, 211–241. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Norden, Martin F. 1994. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Oliver, Michael. 1983. Social Work with Disabled People. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1990. The Politics of Disablement. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Raskin, Victor, ed. 2008. The Primer of Humor Research. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rieser, Richard. 2004. Disabling Imagery?: A Teaching Guide to Disability and Moving Image Media. London: BFI Education. Shakespeare, Tom, ed. 1998. The Disability Reader. London: Continuum. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Politics of Prose, Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wilde, Alison. 2016. Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts. Disability & Society 1: 1313–1315. Wright, Alexa. 2013. Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

CHAPTER 5

Ecocritical Perspectives on Nordic Cinema: From Nature Appreciation to Social Conformism Pietari Kääpä

Definitions Ecocriticism A mode of critical introspection on the interrelations between humanity and the natural environment, emphasizing approaches to cultural production that interrogate human culture’s prioritization of its own value systems but also considers the ways these systems infiltrate all levels of human thinking. Ecocinema The study of cinema’s relationship with the natural environment, focusing on how cinema both represents and appropriates nature through its discursive practices. Anthropocentrism A philosophical and cultural approach that prioritizes human subjectivity and experience over other living organisms or states of being. Anthropocentric thinking sees all experience as mandated by human self-awareness and the need to sustain humanity’s position as the pinnacle on the evolutionary chain.

P. Kääpä (*) Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, The University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_5

69

70 

P. KÄÄPÄ

Ecocentrism A philosophical perspective that seeks to explore alternative modes of thinking on human domination by, for example, highlighting nature’s independence from human control or by emphasizing humanity’s embeddedness and ultimate reliance on sustaining ecosystemic sustainability. Exceptionalism A discursive mode that sees a (national, regional) culture considers its values and patterns of behaviour as leading models for others to emulate whilst enabling it to congratulate itself for its own economic and societal successes.

Introduction The Finnish film Rare Exports (2011) culminates with a battle between hostile ‘man-elves’ (far from the cuddly Hallmark imaginary of Santa Claus with their shrivelled old naked bodies and hostile expressions) and Pietari, the ten-year-­ old protagonist, who, along with a quirky band of local hunters, manages to stop these hostile elves from releasing the real Santa—a towering monster known for spanking naughty children to death—from captivity in the Nordic permafrost. After Santa is defeated, the elves are dispersed and Rare Exports ends with a montage of the hunters dressing up the now-docile elves in bright red Christmas coats and cuddly white beards and shipping them off as ‘authentic Santas’. In a set of short films preceding the release of the feature film, we find out how the hunters perfected the art of capturing, cleaning, teaching and packaging these elves as ‘authentic’ Finnish Christmas commodities. While the commercialization of Christmas is certainly a target of criticism in these short films, they also lay claim to the Santa Claus myth, emphasizing the conception that Santa Claus is said to originate from the Korvatunturi fell in northern Finland. This is an instance of reclaiming Santa back from its ‘coca-colonized’ image but also a politicized strategy to create a self-referential ironic impression of Finland’s cultural exports at the global markets. In Fig. 5.1, a pivotal scene in the feature film sees the protagonist come face to face with the army of dirty hostile elves as the visuals of the film provide a pointed contrast between the untamed ‘natural’ (and nude) elves, the snowy setting, and the human boy, gazing in fear and wonder at this natural/national spectacle. The appearance of the elves takes on a much more pointed contrast later in the film as we observe the hunters domesticating the authentic wildness of the elves, literally repurposing these anthropomorphic wild creatures from an indigenous natural resource to a market commodity, to be harvested for physical and cultural capital. While this display of cultural irony provides plenty of material for scholars of national cinema to critique the discourses used in nation branding and global-

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

71

Fig. 5.1  Rare Exports undermines the cultural imagery of Santa Claus in its critique of global consumerism

ization, adopting a more ecocritical perspective on these same discourses—that is, one focused on the representation of non-human elements as part of the ideological framework of nationhood—can push us in unexpected directions. If nations are largely predicated on cultural inventions and commercial appropriations (as they are in both historical narratives of nationhood and contemporary attempts at nation branding), emphasizing the strategies through which this happens dispels the often taken-for-granted ‘natural’ constitution of a national culture. By interpreting the film through such a critical perspective, Rare Exports is framed as a key example of ‘ecocinema’ providing a particularly ‘ecocritical’ take on the logic of national cultural industries. Thus, it provides a productive starting point for this chapter, exploring the consolidation of such critical discourses—and critical approaches to such discourses—in Nordic film culture. The chapter initially outlines the philosophical and artistic constitution of ecocinema before addressing its variations in this context, from projects on nation-building to social critique, from nature appreciation to resource politics. Its critical perspectives thus encompass environmental themes as well as those of more immediate sociopolitical relevance, a notion underlined by a case study of Ruben Östlund’s dark comedy Force Majeure (2014).

The Framework for Ecocinema Cinema, as a form of popular culture with considerable societal reach and ability to communicate complex issues in an understandable form, proves ideal for rethinking the balance of power between humanity and the environment. In the use of nature as a thematic trope, for example, to evaluate how national ideologies in heritage culture draw on the landscape for their impact, or how parallels between masculinity and nature reinforce a sense of the ‘national character’, film studies have found nature a powerful rhetorical tool. Furthermore,

72 

P. KÄÄPÄ

the rhetoric of naturalization extends to the ways cinematic anthropology depicts cultures that are perceived as closer to nature than the ‘civilized’ industrialized society. At stake in these largely cultural philosophical explorations is the generation of a better understanding of the ways humanity lives with and incorporates its environmental context to bulk up the existential and ideological narratives of its ‘dasein’—or of its ‘being in the world’. Thus, while landscape and ethnographic studies are vital areas of film research, they often replicate a more or less taken-for-granted approach to the anthropocentricity of the cinema. As such, they focus on social or cultural concerns in a way that does not question the reliance of human experience on its environmental context. Lu and Mi (2009) provide a productive approach that conceptualizes ‘ecocinema’ as an interpretative strategy to question the conventional ways in which the environment is represented in film cultures. The scope and practice of ecocinema operates as a way to study the discursive and ideological content of films as well as providing an ethical-environmental approach to the production practices of films. According to Mi and Lu, it involves “the study of the production and reproduction of life, the relationship between the human body and the ecosystem, and the controlling and administering of the human body in modern capitalist and socialist regimes” (Lu and Mi 2009: 2). It thus provides a means to generate understanding of the entangled relations of humankind and its environmental context. The academic study of ecocinema focuses on specific film cultures (Brereton 2005; Kääpä 2014), ethics (Brereton 2015), film philosophy (Ivakhiv 2008), transnational cinema (Gustafsson and Kääpä 2013) as well as individual films (Taylor 2013), to name some of these directions. Monani, Rust and Cubitt’s Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2012) takes this even further as it argues that the field does not only have to deal with films with obvious environmental content. All films are ecological in the sense that they gesture to anthropocentric perceptions of this relationship or mirror some of the social politics of contemporary society. According to them, the concept of ecocinema can apply to practically all films in as much as they evoke critical responses to humanity’s role in the world. They base this assertion on the notion that films show “a troubled state of affairs not only in human interactions, but also with the non-human world. Cinema provides a window into how we imagine this state of affairs, and how we act with or against it” (Monani et  al. 2012: 3). Simply put, the ecological argumentations of film texts can work on multiple levels and include ideological positions that may seem contradictory or even anti-environmentalist. Thus, a franchise like The Fast and The Furious (2001–) can be part of this field, as focus can shift to the discourses it uses to promote unquestioned consumerist thinking in popular culture. Similarly, a film like Rare Exports may not seem related to environmental concerns at first glance, but as we have suggested above, ecocritical perspectives consider its content as a commentary on the use of indigenous resources in the discourses of national narration.

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

73

For this chapter, national narratives provide the most productive focus as they constitute, arguably, one of the most productive approaches to unravelling some of the anthropocentric drives underlying ecocinema. At the same time, it is absolutely central to address environmentalist arguments concerning activities like sustainability drives, green energy production, environmental policy and nature conservation as they have been represented in film texts. These provide valuable perspectives for addressing human-led harvesting of resources and exploitation of the environment for both economic and cultural gains. Crucially, these areas are often a constitutive part of how nations conceptualize their dominant social and cultural values, a discussion to which this chapter now turns.

The Paradoxes of Nordic Ecocinema The cinemas of the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) embody, for good and bad, some of the key examples through which film cultures wrestle with their environmental responsibilities. From summits on climate change to resource and energy production, from sustainable development to enhancing the greening of urban spaces, the Nordic countries maintain leading roles in ecological progress and policy on an increasingly global level. These countries can rightfully consider themselves global leaders in sustainable policy and practice and are host to advanced levels of societal environmental activism and governmental policy. Public awareness and knowledge of issues such as climate change and global warming are high and are reflected in strict policing of organizational and corporate responsibility. Most importantly, all five Nordic countries reached a level of uniform consent on the importance of environmental policy by the 2000s, even if differences remain in their implementation. Sweden, for one, takes substantial pride in developing its reputation as a leader in environmental thinking, whereas Norway is committed to developing renewable sources of energy to balance its reliance on oil reserves. This optimism is echoed by Solability’s Global Sustainability Index where all five of the Nordic countries led the poll for the fifth year running in 2015. At the same time, the greening of the Nordic countries is by no means a given process but rather a complex, potentially hypocritical form of sustainable development and resource management, involving both greenwashing and contradictory public relations as well as inspiring idealism and resourceful environmentalist activism. Operating as part of the European Union and on global platforms including various climate summits (among them the now infamous Copenhagen Summit in 2009), the Nordic countries have been able to advance environmental policy and sustainability awareness in many key sectors including the adoption of renewable resources and implementation of global standards in energy production. Simultaneously, the negative press received by several Nordic ‘green’ corporations, such as the wind turbine manufacturer Vestas and foresting company Stora Enso, paint a very different picture, while the economic and resource infrastructures of countries such as Norway and

74 

P. KÄÄPÄ

Finland rely on oil and nuclear power, which remain the topic of controversy and extensive criticism from environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These contradictions are evident not only in environmental policy (see Kääpä 2018) but also in the ways they are approached in cinema, as both a cultural industrialist form of popular entertainment and a politicized form of cultural argumentation. But what forms do they take in contemporary Nordic film culture? Nordic cinemas are small nation film cultures (as defined by Hjort and Petrie 2007) which translate to a distinct emphasis on public funding for cinema. As the audience tends to be restricted due to their small populations, and the distribution of films limited on the basis of cultural and linguistic obstacles (at least in theory), film production is heavily reliant on film institutes to provide subsidies for film production, judged on a merit-based structure, which has traditionally resulted in productions that have demonstrable artistic or societal worth. More recently, the emergence of domestically popular genre film production, partially as a result of transformations in funding policies and partially due to the internationalization of film production, has challenged understandings of what constitutes ‘appropriate’ Nordic cinema. Such considerations also extend to environmental concerns as these production types have distinct ways of incorporating nature into their discursive structures. Thus, this chapter will now explain how more traditionalist national cinema discourse (seen in, e.g., heritage cinema, a type of film production heavily subsidized through public funds) and more genre-based popular cinema (focusing on commercialized, often playful narratives like Rare Exports) harvest nature in different ways, largely due to the production modes that facilitate these films. Secondly, the focus is on two thematic areas that elaborate on particularly Nordic concerns for ecocinema analysis. These consist of the ways films use discursive structures to represent (1) resource politics and (2) the welfare society, both areas that touch on significant concerns in these film cultures as well as pointing to ways to further incorporate ecocritical analysis to European film studies.

Nature as a Narrative Commodity An appropriate starting point to consider Nordic cinema’s use of nature as a cultural-ideological tool comes from heritage narratives which often rely on impressions of national historicity, which in film culture have tended to rely on the use of landscape and other natural elements as signifiers of authenticity. Nordic examples from the Finnish Niskavuori series (1938–, focusing on a family dynasty around a rural estate) to contemporary productions such as the Icelandic Of Horses and Men (2015) showcase these discursive structures. Natural iconography contributes cultural capital to the narratives of these films to emphasize their role in national canons by distinguishing the films as cases of unique national film culture, often through parallels between human behaviour and the national environmental ecosystem. This approach to nature as a cultural commodity is frequently echoed in several studies of national cinema

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

75

emphasizing the constitutive role of nature in national narratives (see Bondebjerg et al. 1997 for Danish perspectives; Hedling and Wallengren 2006 for Swedish; Von Bagh 2000 for Finnish; Iversen and Solum 2010 for Norwegian; Nordfjörd 2010 for Icelandic). While nature is conceptualized as providing origins for national narratives, its role is ultimately a secondary one to sociopolitical idioms. From an ecocritical standpoint, these academic evocations of heritage cinema continue to play a role that consolidates human dominance over the natural environment, an approach that takes the role of the natural environment as subordinate to anthropocentric culture as a given. Cinema is, of course, an anthropocentric undertaking, and it would be unproductive to try to dispel the human from this production infrastructure. Indeed, displacing the human is not the intention here as, instead, the key is to understand the rhetoric of national cinema as inherently anthropocentric in its appropriation of the natural environment, an appropriation that, crucially, often presents its modes as ‘natural’ and unquestioned—this, in turn, is often used to strengthen the essentialist discourse of nationalism. Incorporating nature into the cultural vocabulary of a given film culture is part of what cinema does—where would the American Western genre be without its iconographic shots of Monument Valley, for example? In Nordic film culture, this sort of appropriation provides a particularly strong connection between film production and the funding infrastructure (though it would be foolish to claim that only films with natural themes receive funding, as we will see later). Yet, “the question is not how we escape human valuation but whether it is possible to think of ways in which the value of natural things is not subordinate to the way they ratify the consumption patterns of human beings” (Smith 1998: 5). As suggested, these arguments can often be found in the most unlikely of places—popular cinema.

Popular Genre Film and Inverse Natural Narratives The integration of the Nordic film markets into global flows of cultural production and the emergence of a new generation of film producers with an interest in and ability to engage international cinematic trends in recent years have transformed the infrastructures of Nordic cinema. While it would be too enthusiastic to suggest nature is afforded a different role in this commercialized, global form of Nordic cinema, an increased sense of play as regards the connotations of nature as a cultural commodity can be observed here. This is especially the case with the horror genre, which has played a significant role in many contemporary Nordic cinemas and their attempts to cater for new audiences. The 2000s has seen a cycle of Norwegian slasher films instigate a rebranding of Norwegian cinema with films such as Dead Snow (2009) and Cold Prey (2005) appropriating myths from the Norwegian cultural canon concerning wild snowy mountains and expansive fjords, but instead of using these to strengthen a sense of essentialist national identity, the films make wild nature a locus for fear and disruption (see Iversen 2011).

76 

P. KÄÄPÄ

Thus, as with the international variations of the slasher genre, these films tend to focus on a group of young professionals, working in industries representative of transnational global capitalism like advertising or media production, who venture out into a ‘cabin in the woods’, but instead of finding solace from the dislocations of global consumerism, nature provides an insurmountable and often destructive challenge. Simultaneously, films focusing on mythical fairy tales (such as The Troll Hunter, 2008) and landmarks (The Wave, 2015) upend the traditional connotations of these signifiers of national culture and identity by focusing on trolls as diseased monsters and the fjords as hosts for natural catastrophes. These narratives invariably start from a perspective where humans use science and technology to conquer the environment, but the roles are inverted by the end of the narratives as humanity is, often physically and very violently, displaced from the position of dominant species. While popular historical epics and war films—often relying on conservative approaches to appropriating nature—continue to populate cinemas, these new productions indicate a different view on what role nature continues to play in envisioning nationhood, as the Norwegian fjords or North Finland’s fells take on alternative connotations used to critique linear conceptions of national history. Alongside some of the more conventional heritage productions, these films indicate emergent ways of using nature in national cinema. While the perspectives of these genre films criticize the unquestioning appropriation of nature into national narratives, they also, of course, use nature, albeit now to critique the perspectives of their cinematic predecessors. Yet, this appropriative, and also inherently anthropocentric, approach is now problematized—it becomes a question mark, not a taken-for-granted fact. Thus, some of these processes in film politics, concerns not commonly associated with environmental themes, clearly influence the constitution of Nordic ecocinema. These are only very cursory assertions, however, as many of the patterns identified here are part of a much more complex framework, featuring the participation and vested interests of a variety of stakeholders. Yet, while much more needs to be said on this relationship between film politics and the environment, these cursory evaluations allow us to gesture to some of the patterns through which environmental issues in cinema can be analysed outside of only looking at the textual level.

Resource Politics While infrastructure and production arrangements matter for the ways the cinema approaches environmental issues, the majority of advances ecocinema generates on a societal level take place through texts. Furthermore, a key argument for centralizing Nordic cinema as a particular focus emerges from the ways it addresses concerns endemic to the sociopolitical constitution of each country. The Nordic countries can boast some of the world’s leading gross domestic products (GDPs) and position themselves as exceptional environmental leaders. This is especially the case as the Nordic model of social welfare often evokes

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

77

interest and wide-ranging attempts to emulate its parameters, a fascination that is heavily reliant on the region’s affluence, itself premised on its natural resource infrastructure (Bondeson 2003). While Sweden and Denmark have invested substantially in green energy, Finland’s production incentives are increasingly premised on nuclear power. In contrast, Iceland can provide 80% of the population’s energy consumption from renewable resources such as geothermal and hydropower, which enables it to feature high in environmental rankings. Similar critiques play out in other contexts. Norway announced its intention to go carbon neutral by 2030, advancing an earlier deadline of 2050 by 20  years. Critics, however, question the rationale and feasibility of the plan, especially as the country is heavily indebted to oil and gas for its domestic welfare and economic prosperity (Miljodirektoratet 2018). They point out that achieving carbon neutrality will not be feasible on the basis of cutting emissions domestically or imposing substantial restrictions on oil production. Instead, it is heavily reliant on purchasing carbon credits, a typical manoeuvre for affluent Western countries wanting to benefit from the positive connotations of a green image where ‘environmental accounting’ means supporting environmental incentives in developing countries while maintaining consumption standards at the home market. To confirm some of these suspicions, the Nordic countries have been ranked in the top 20 countries with the largest ecological footprint (The Footprint Network 2010). The confluence of these ideas facilitates an ecocritical take, especially, on the ways economics and the role of capitalism feature in these films. Capitalism, unsurprisingly, is a key critical target of ecocriticism, as its ideological principles and concrete manifestations are widely understood as prime causes of environmental depletion and exploitation. For us, it is significant to note that the Nordic countries are some of the key arbitrators of capitalist practices, despite their commitment to social egalitarianism and the welfare state. Susanna Fellman et al. highlight some of the practices that have been key to constructing a Nordic form of capitalism, which enables it to exist as one of the most competitive regions in the world (Fellman et al. 2008: 18). They note the frequency with which welfare state policies combine with government-sanctioned forms of private enterprise and competition, leading to very profitable mergers of state and private enterprise, with distinct environmental repercussions, such as the Norwegian Statoil and the Finnish Stora Enso. These visible flagships of Nordic capitalism combine with domestic policies premised on high taxes and well-functioning welfare systems, facilitating, at least in theory, the foundations for the cultural prestige and economic viability these countries command globally. These next sections shall focus on such politics from the angle, first of all, of the considerable resource infrastructure, and, second, its translation to the societal level where natural resources transform into a curious ideological foundation combining welfare principles with capitalism. Considering the significance of resource politics enabling Nordic affluence and, by extension, Nordic culture and identity, it is not surprising that screen media frequently takes a critical approach to depicting these issues. Norwegian

78 

P. KÄÄPÄ

television shows (Occupied, 2015) and films (Pioneer 2012) interrogate the state economy’s reliance on oil, while Denmark has produced television shows focusing on the integration between the country’s wind and banking industries (Follow the Money/Bedrag, 2014–). At the same time, Finnish producers have depicted aspects of the country’s mining infrastructure in critical terms through both documentary and fiction films (The Men of Talvivaara, 2015; Giant, 2015). Others have taken a more playful approach to inspecting the impact of resource politics and climate change on people, with the Icelandic slasher film The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009) showing us how local fishermen (‘fishbillies’) turn to massacring tourists as fish supplies dwindle and complex regulations jeopardize their livelihoods. Nowhere is this strategy of combining genre conventions and political themes more obvious than in Shooter (2013), a thriller about a disgruntled scientist who shoots politicians with a high-powered rifle to protest the government’s drilling in the Arctic. Described by the Danish Film Institute as an environmental thriller, it illustrates the idea that the requisite level of political commitment comes from communicating environmental concerns to the general public. Of course, the framing of environmental debates as part of popular cinema is nothing new as The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Avatar (2009) can testify. Yet, the particularities of the media environment of the Nordic countries (public funding translating into politically meaningful content) mean that environmental concerns are a key strategy for the Nordic screen industries. Simultaneously, the use of these genre conventions arguably detracts from the weight of these messages and simplifies their complexity into genre conventions. Such arguments are of course common in discussing popular film culture, and considering the Nordic countries’ commitment to public service broadcasting, documentary production has taken up these ideas with considerable frequency. They focus on nuclear power (Into Eternity, 2010), the foresting industry (The Red Forest Hotel, 2012), the food industry (Bananas! 2009) and the consumption patterns of individuals (Recipes for Disaster, 2008). Here, the focus is even more explicitly on critiquing the foundations that enable the societal affluence common to these societies. The model they adopt is based on the first-person activist documentary popularized by Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth (2005) as they focus, invariably, on White male protagonists exploring the resource basis that provides this affluence. While these perspectives can be justifiably critiqued for their class and gender bias, other documentaries take a much more complex role to inspecting the resource infrastructure, including Katja Gauriloff’s Canned Dreams (2012) (about the material and human costs of a can of cheap ravioli). Yet, while these documentaries play an important role as politically committed ecocinema, they are also somewhat orthodox in their approaches to ­thinking about the relationship between film and the environment as they do not get us much beyond anthropocentric considerations in cinema. Their discursive structures continue to distinguish between the environment and human culture in ways that lack more critical understanding of this complex correla-

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

79

tion. In contrast, a truly ecocentric approach would not have to be as extreme as to displace the human from the picture but would, at the very least, seek to view the human as part of a much more fundamental system of ecological narration. These concerns shall be addressed in more detail later, but for now, the focus is on charting some of these anthropocentric discourses in Nordic sociorealist cinema.

Ecocritical Approaches to Nordic Capitalism and the Welfare State A key consideration in any analysis of the political dimensions of Nordic cinema is the constitutive ideology of the welfare state. Numerous studies in sociology, culture, economics and politics explore the diverse manifestations of welfare politics and ideology on the populations and constitution of these countries (for historical overviews and discussion of ongoing transformations, see Kautto et al. 2001; Kvist et al. 2012). The Nordic model of the welfare state is characterized primarily by the strong co-operation of the state and private enterprise. A sense of egalitarianism and aspirations to universalism are supplemented by high taxes, comprehensive social and health care mechanisms, emphasis on the rights of individuals and some of the highest GDPs globally. While differences in historical development and policy are clear among the five states, identifying similarities is not particularly difficult, and the idea of the Nordic model pervades social policy discourse globally, causing both emulation and criticism of certain exclusivist tendencies (and diverse perspectives on what exactly comprises this model, as Kautto’s work suggests). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the welfare state is a central concern in most, if not all, contemporary publications on Nordic cinema (for examples, see Soila, Widding and Iversen 1998; Nestingen and Elkington 2005; Nestingen 2008; Kääpä 2010). Perhaps surprisingly, the films these works focus on mostly depict the contemporary welfare state in a largely negative light. One could ask why this would be the case, especially considering all the glowing assertions of the exceptional advances of the Nordic welfare model. In part, this is a result of austerity programmes such as those implemented by the Danish state in the 1980s, or a sense of scepticism towards the ideological underpinnings of welfare capitalism following severe crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in the 1990s, often as a direct result of mismanaged credit booms and adoption of dubious fiscal policies. These ideological transformations can be explored by considering welfare ideologies in a range of films, especially as they relate to the discursive rhetoric of national cinema. Yet, how can the critical tools established by ecocinema studies be used to rethink these aspects of Nordic society and culture? If nature has been used as the glue to tie the nation together in heritage cinema, for example, in much of the sociorealist cinema, the environment takes on the role of a corrupting indicator that unravels the cohesiveness of such narratives. In contrast to addressing the ways national narratives use nature as a cultural resource, often

80 

P. KÄÄPÄ

vindicating traditionalist or even conservative politics, urbanity emerges as a constructed opposite to the authenticity to be found in nature. Contemporary approaches to ecocinema frequently include studies of the ways human habitats function as part of the complexity of the contemporary planetary ecosphere. Indeed, conceptualizing human habitation as entirely different from ‘natural’ ecosystems would resort to the sort of anthropocentric binaries much of contemporary ecocriticism aims to undo. Thus, while the ecological purpose of urban portrayals is not as evident as those of the more ‘natural’ variety, many, if not all, these films must be considered in ecocritical terms. Ecological metaphors can be mobilized to rethink the idea of the ‘People’s Home’ (inspired by the Swedish Folkshemmet conception), a concept that faces considerable challenges in the twenty-first century as increased privatization, outsourcing practices, tax competition and ever visible differences in income distribution challenge any notion of the egalitarianism on which the welfare state is premised (see Leibfried 2001; Heikkilä et al. 2002; Dahl and Eriksen 2005; Kettunen and Petersen 2005, for discussion of these challenges). Underlying all this is the role of globalization as a force that is often perceived to challenge the simplicity of, in many ways, the ‘natural’ state of things captured so superficially in heritage cinema. Key works, including Hjort’s Small Nation Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (2010) and Nestingen and Elkington’s Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005), accordingly, focus on the diverse ways globalization and Nordic cinema interact. Globalization and the integration of markets and politics are largely considered the wider causes behind the structural transformations that signify the increased adoption of neoliberal policy and the consequent dilution of welfare functions, but when they are presented in films like the Swedish film A Man Called Ove (2015) (dealing with a gated suburban community whose docile harmony is challenged by the arrival of an immigrant family, see Moffat and Kääpä 2018), they are often expressed through environmental metaphors. Here, the requisition of land for human relationship management ties the disparate groups together through a naturalized visual metaphor. Similarly, another established trope is films using the relationships between animals and humans as a means to reflect on social cohesion, where animals act as the stand-­ ins for fraught human relations (Rams, 2015), while others use them to depict the fragile balance of disparate social groupings in natural spaces (Wolf, 2008). Other films draw on a much darker politics of racial profiling where ‘naturalized’ distinctions between the human and non-human are mobilized to distinguish between hegemonic populations and ethnic minorities, predominantly the Sami minority in Sweden, Norway and Finland. These range from excessively problematic films such as White Reindeer (1954) to films like Sami Blood (2017) that aggressively take these politics to task. They draw on a dark history of using a range of physiological notions of racial difference to separate those who belong and those who must be marginalized, precisely through the metaphor of natural belonging. Genetics are not only used to distinguish those who belong to the Nordic welfare state but as a tool to critically inspect the internal

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

81

corruption the smallness of these societies can cause. The politics of the Icelandic Jar City (2011)—about the complications of solving a murder in Iceland by using DNA samples from its isolated genetic heritage—end up not depicting a resource-intensive self-sustaining society but one that is consumed from within by corruption. Seen from the perspective of ecocritical analysis, by focusing on the countries’ ethnic composition and dubious immigration politics, cinematic representations of the homogeneity and affluence of Nordic welfare states end up highlighting fractures and contradictions instead of a unified politics of social cohesion.

Case Study: Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, 2014) To illustrate some of these discussions, Force Majeure, a complex film that makes itself available to a range of readings, exemplifies many of the discursive inclinations taken by these Nordic creatives on synergizing nature and societal criticism, while it also reveals some of the ideological problems of these productions. Focusing on the workaholic Tomas, a man on a skiing trip in the Alps with his wife Ebba and two children, the film takes aim at complacent neoliberal values in its deconstruction of the Nordic exceptionalist mentality. During lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche cascades towards the diners, who panic, with some cowering under the tables, others running off. Tomas reacts on a whim to grab his gloves and iPhone and runs away. As can be seen in Fig. 5.2, the collision of humanity and the natural environment provides an existential shock to Swedish affluence, with the avalanche dwarfing the panicked, out-of-control humans. This act of largely unintended cowardice has substantial repercussions as it slowly dawns on everyone how flawed he is as a

Fig. 5.2  An avalanche terrifies an international group of tourists and fragments the façade of their superficial neoliberal safety net

82 

P. KÄÄPÄ

human being. As tensions between husband and wife escalate, the film questions the stability of key components of the welfare state through this representative metonym—the successful neoliberal nuclear family unit, whose strength and cohesion instantly dissipate in the face of uncontrollable external threats. As suggested, the content of Force Majeure practically invites multiple readings. For one, its focus on the tourist industry suggests for it to be viewed as a critique of neoliberal values—a perspective emphasized by the frequent presence of the hotel cleaner who gazes with cynicism at the unfolding spectacle of Tomas in meltdown. More importantly, the film also facilitates an ecological reading with its theme of an insurmountable environmental encounter destroying the lives of its human protagonists. These sorts of metaphoric narratives are a hallmark of literature harkening back to classic tales like Moby Dick. Whereas Melville’s environmental metaphors have been seen as a critique of empire, amongst many other readings, Force Majeure’s narrative invites an understanding of this environmental encounter as a critique of neoliberalism as well as the value systems underpinning the Nordic welfare state. To illustrate, there are many key moments of the narrative that are most productively unpacked from an environmentally aligned approach, with the environmental context shaping and motivating narrative actions. For example, the film ends with the culmination of the ‘holiday’, but Ebba soon panics at the shoddy behaviour of the driver in charge of the tourist bus ferrying the tourists back to the airport. The Swedish tourists are abandoned to walk back to the hotel along a winding mountain road. Out of the whole group, only Charlotte, a Swedish woman who shocked Ebba earlier with her cavalier attitude to extramarital relations (and who acts as a metonym for a more individualist way of life than the conformism of the nuclear unit), stays on the bus as it speeds down the road. As night falls on this group, Tomas accepts a cigarette from a fellow traveller. His daughter, surprised by such a turn of behaviour, asks if he now smokes, to which he responds affirmatively and smirks at the camera. While Tomas has been challenged by this ‘vacation’, it seems the environmental challenges he has faced have made him realize his true self. Out of this dishevelled and dislocated group of affluent Swedes, only Charlotte and Tomas thrive— she will have made it to her destination, while he has discovered a new lease on life that seems to have been curtailed by his responsibilities as the head of the family unit and now released through his ordeal. In this playful conclusion, an environmental encounter does not result in the disbandment of social order but its reorganization into a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, a mode fundamentally antithetical to welfare ideologies. If the narrative started out as a critique of neoliberalist individualism, it ends in a very different place. In this, way, the environmental encounter has not so much revealed the fragility of the welfare state but its true exceptionalist essence. As with Rare Exports, cultural irony provides one angle through which to interpret Force Majeure, but adopting a more ecocritical perspective—that is, one that does not only focus on the environment as a tool to reflect on human subjectivity, but also considers the representation of non-human elements as

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

83

part of the discursive framework of the film—will reveal more unexpected directions. Most of the film certainly does provide material for an ecocritical perspective as it uses the environment to unravel societal constructions. The avalanche, the obvious environmental elephant in the room, to use an appropriately problematic metaphor, is in many ways a clichéd representation of the might of nature, and it would be an overstatement to suggest that there are any real environmentalist concerns or considerations at play in the film’s discursive statements, that is, to do with global warming for one. If any such considerations do make themselves felt, they only work on a more subtextual level that may in fact be largely unacknowledged by the producers of the film. Certainly, the film makes it obvious that the resort is a fabricated mirage in the Alps, catering for the affluent tourists who presumably have to travel extensive distances to reach the location, thus generating a heavy carbon footprint. The explosions that rock the hotel to control avalanches, and the water being sprayed on the ski slopes, indicate these as examples of manufactured landscapes. The aural assault of the explosions and the grinding of the ski lifts break up any illusion of an encounter with untamed nature, an exercise the film repeats at consistent intervals. There is no depth to the place, which appears more like a simulacrum of ‘nature’ than anything tangible or concrete. It complements the themes highlighted by the film concerning the superficiality endemic to neoliberal ideology, as well as its extension into welfare capitalism, but only in a manner that reinforces an anthropocentric view of the world. The environment is brushed aside to make space for human psychodrama, even in the scene where characters ski on pristine hills or when fog envelopes all visibility—these are just gimmicks to reflect human states of mind. In total, the film uses nature to address societal politics in an anthropocentric vein. At the same time, to claim Force Majeure to be a film about environmentalism or exhibiting an ecocentric worldview would be imposing expectations on the film that it has no intention of meeting. It is resolutely a ‘typical’ Nordic art film with a sociorealist critique in mind, one that it establishes through using the environment as representative tool. The film can be seen as an example of a text that in no way challenges any notion of anthropocentric dominance but in fact reinforces it by making it so absolute. Simultaneously, ‘discovering’ this perspective is not the point of this chapter. Instead what this discussion aims to highlight is the fact that underlying this text is a complex set of assumptions about human approaches to the environment, one that is more revealing about attitudes that are often unacknowledged in their anthropocentric orientation. Through this, the film acts as a critical incentive to approach Nordic cinema from an ecocritical perspective, premised on the understanding that “the world is composed of the social sphere and the ecosphere, that the two are interrelated, and that the former cannot be considered outside of the context of the latter” (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010: 3). Yet, the film, or even cinema in general, at its most ecocritical, can only aim to aspire to an ecocentric worldview, but largely, ends up reinforcing anthropocentric paradigms endemic to the national cultures that give rise to them.

84 

P. KÄÄPÄ

Conclusion Ecocritical studies of film culture must be prepared to work with a much wider range of themes than simply focusing on films with an environmental connection or a green agenda. Ecocinema encompasses a wide set of approaches, from those that explicitly target unsustainable resource use, to those that provide a glimpse into dominant cultural norms that often prioritize anthropocentric value systems. While a film like Force Majeure certainly makes use of environmental iconography, it remains inevitably limited by its very use of the environment to address human concerns. If a film like Force Majeure would claim to be truly bio- or ecocentric, it would need to foreground these concerns much more—for example, by emphasizing the environmental, rather than the human, costs of the tourism industry. Of course, this would fundamentally alter its constitution and be counterproductive for the inherent diversity of Nordic cinema. While the aim is not to support such extreme measures, the point of this discussion emerges from emphasizing that cultural production operates with an inevitable anthropocentric discursive bias. At the same time, the ecophilosopher Lawrence Buell suggests that it is “entirely possible without hypocrisy to maintain biocentric values in principle while recognizing that in practice these must be constrained by anthropocentric considerations, whether as a matter of strategy or as a matter of intractable human self-interestedness” (Buell 2005: 134). This balancing between the anthropo- and the ecocentric reflects Félix Guattari’s words on the ways constitutive ideologies operate on an almost unconscious level in human cultures. In the case of film production, it is up to the ecocritics to question and critique such operations, conducting arguments that will have to work “towards rebuilding human relations at every level of the society” and countering the negative influences of anti-environmentalist logic, which is “extending its influence over the whole social, economic and cultural life of the planet … by infiltrating the unconscious subjective strata” (Guattari 2000: 49). If films like Force Majeure testify to anything, it is to the need to consider the role of cinema as a complex sphere of contesting discourses that can be used to unravel and critique the underlying hegemonic ideological frameworks of society as well as to confront our own idealism and our embeddedness in the constitutive ideological structures being criticized. While explicit environmentalist rhetoric and the rethinking of existing anthropocentric paradigms is absolutely vital to the ongoing development of the field, ecocinema, as both a form of cultural production and an intellectual approach, needs to be understood from both anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives, reflecting the often-unconscious constitutive ideologies of society as well as challenging the limitations these ideological formations pose. Yet, this chapter can only lay claim to charting some of the main patterns through which the ideological and political contributions of films operate. To study the ways these films are produced is another urgent concern for future projects, where the production infrastructures of the Nordic film industries are

5  ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON NORDIC CINEMA: FROM NATURE… 

85

deserving of further research from an environmental perspective. To investigate the ecological footprint of Nordic productions, researchers are encouraged to expand on the environmental management of the media studies conducted by Kääpä (2018) and consider, among others, the ways certain stylistic inventions, such as the lingering presence of the Dogme aesthetic or the frequently cited uses of Nordic light, influence the footprint of these productions. Any assessment of Nordic cinema’s ecological viability must engage with these areas. But ultimately, it all comes down to the level of the audience to move past the ‘educated conjecture’ that textual readings inevitably and invariably are. For now, this brief evocation of key future research directions urges reflection on the fact that while environmentalist, even inherently ecocentric messages may be communicated, they may also go unheard in society, and it is here that audience research can make its most significant contribution.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Can film make audiences become more attuned to ­ environmental concerns? 2. Are there particular cultural variations of ecocinema that showcase different approaches to environmental politics? 3. Can film productively criticize environmentally harmful consumptive behaviours while relying on the same modes of consumption for its existence? 4. How does the film industry account for its need to project socially beneficial images with its need to use resources to produce them?

References Bondebjerg, Ib, Jensen Andersen, and Peter Schlepelern. 1997. Dansk Film, 1927–1997. Copenhagen: Munksgaard-Rosinante. Bondeson, Ulla. 2003. Nordic Moral Climates: Value Continuities and Discontinuities in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. Brereton, Pat. 2005. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2015. Environmental Ethics and Film. New York: Routledge. Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. London: Blackwell. Dahl, Hanne Marlene and Eriksen, Tine Rask (2005) Dilemmas of Care in the Nordic Welfare State. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fellman, Susanna, Martin Jes Iversen, Hans Sjögren, and Lars Thue. 2008. Creating Nordic Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Footprint Network, The (2010) ‘Ecological footprint atlas 2010’, Available at: https:// www.footprintnetwork.org/content/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_ Atlas_2010.pdf (Accessed 25 February 2020). Guattari, Felix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. London and New Brunswick: Athlone Press.

86 

P. KÄÄPÄ

Gustafsson, Tommy, and Pietari Kääpä (eds.) (2013) Transnational Ecocinema. Bristol: Intellect. Hedling, Erik, and Ann-Kristin Wallengren. 2006. Solskenslandet. Svensk film på 2000-­ talet. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis. Heikkilä, Matti et al. (2002) Hyvinvointi ja tulevaisuus maalla ja kaupungissa. Sosiaalija terveysalan tutkimus- ja kehittämiskeskus, Saarijärvi: Gummerus. Hjort, Mette, and Duncan Petrie. 2007. The Cinema of Small Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2008. Green Film Criticism and Its Futures. International Studies in Literature and Environment 15 (2): 1–28. Iversen, Gunnar (2011) Norsk Filmhistorie: spillefilmen 1911–2011. Oslo: Universitetsforlag, 2011. Iversen, Gunnar, and Ove Solum. 2010. Den norske filmbolgen: fra Orions belte til Max Manus. Oslo: Universitetsforlag. Kääpä, Pietari. 2010. The National and Beyond. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2014. Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2018. Environmental Management of the Media: Policy, Industry, Practice. New York: Routledge. Kautto, Mikko, Johan Fritzell, Bjørn Hvinden, Jon Kvist, and Hannu Uusitalo, eds. 2001. Nordic Welfare States in the European Context. London: Routledge. Kettunen, Pauli and Petersen, Klaus (2005) Beyond Welfare State Models. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Kvist, Jon, Johan Fritzel, Bjørn Hvinden, and Olli Kangas, eds. 2012. Changing Social Equality: The Nordic Welfare Model in the 21st Century. Bristol: The Policy Press. Leibfried, Stephan (2001) Welfare State Futures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lu, Sheldon H., and Jiayan Mi, eds. 2009. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Miljodirektoratet. 2018. Tre forskjellige historier om en varmere verden mot 2100. Oslo: Regeringen. Moffat, Kate and Kääpä, Pietari (2018) Unthinking ethnocentrism: Ecocritical approaches to ethnic diversity in Nordic screen media. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 8 (2): 149–165. Monani, Salma, Stephen Rust, and Sean Cubitt, eds. 2012. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Nestingen, Andrew (2008) Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nestingen, Andrew, and Trevor Elkington, eds. 2005. Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Nordfjörd, Björn. 2010. Dagur Kári’s Nói the Albino. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Smith, M.J. 1998. Ecologism: Towards Ecological Citizenship. Buckingham: Open University Press. Soila, Tytti et  al. (eds.) (1998) Nordic National Cinemas. London: British Film Institute. Taylor, Bron, ed. 2013. Avatar and Nature Spirituality. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Von Bagh, Peter. 2000. Drifting Shadows: A Guide to Finnish Cinema. Helsinki: SKS. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, ed. 2010. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in Holocaust Cinema Ingrid Lewis

Definitions Holocaust The Holocaust is defined as the persecution and murder of six million Jewish people, along with other categories of victims, set in place by the Nazi regime and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Holocaust Film There is a considerable lack of consensus among scholars, with the term “Holocaust film” seeming to eschew inflexible classifications the more scholars endeavour to provide an exact definition. The wider research in which this chapter is located adopts an all-encompassing definition of Holocaust cinema that includes films which portray perpetrators, resisters and the persecution of Jews and non-Jewish victims. The definition comprises also films that deal with the roots of the Holocaust as well as with its aftermath. However, this chapter

Ingrid Lewis, The Trauma of (Post)Memory: Women’s Memories in the Holocaust Cinema of the New Millennium, published in: Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters, 2017, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. I. Lewis (*) Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_6

87

88 

I. LEWIS

focuses exclusively on Jewish women and their connection to memory, be it second or even third generation, where the film narrative affords direct knowledge on the Holocaust. Postmemory Coined by Marianne Hirsch (2012: 5), postmemory refers to a controversial concept of transference of Holocaust memories from survivors to their children. As she claims, by growing up and living in close proximity to survivors, this “second generation” inherits a set of personal and collective memories that are transmitted “so deeply and affectively” that they become “memories in their own right”. Vicarious Witnessing Taking the postmemory concept even further, this term describes the process of assimilating traumatic memories by people who are remotely connected with the event. Following experiential encounters facilitated by museums, photographs, films and literary narratives, among others, people use the power of imagination to make sense of highly traumatic events such as the Holocaust. It is a very self-reflexive experience motivated by the need for a deep understanding of the past and its connections with the present.

Introduction The final scene of the film The Third Half (2012) shows the protagonist Rebecca Cohen, now in old age, visiting the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia, located in Skopje. Getting close to one of the symbolic funerary urns in memory of the victims, she starts a monologue with her dead father while holding a family photo against the glass box that protects the urn: Here we meet again, Dad… Remember me? Your little daughter, who listened to her heart and ran away from you. Both you and the man I loved have been dead for many years now. I’m going to join you soon. But before I die, there’s something I’d like to show you. These are my sons and daughters, their husbands and wives, my grandchildren and their children. They are the fruit of my betrayal and descendants of your blood. They are my proof that a woman can score as well… I won the game, Dad!

Rebecca’s final exclamation and the photo of her numerous descendants are a celebration of life as she rejoices in her victory against the Nazis (see Fig. 6.1). This culminating moment of the film takes place after Rebecca narrates her memories, in flashback, on the occasion of a visit with her great-granddaughter to Skopje for the inauguration of the Holocaust Memorial. The Third Half exemplifies a recent cycle of films that engage with the past from the point of

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

89

Fig. 6.1  Rebecca Cohen’s monologue in front of a funerary urn for the Holocaust victims of Macedonia in Darko Mitrevski’s The Third Half (2012)

view of the first generation of survivors, as well as 1.5,1 second and third generations of Jewish women. Originating from varied corners of Europe such as France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Macedonia, Italy, Sweden and Belgium, these films explore to different extents the lives of Jewish women in connection with the Holocaust, and in doing so they create valid premises for analysing the relation between gender, memory and representation. These films are Louba’s Ghosts (2001) by Martine Dugowson, Nowhere in Africa (2001) by Caroline Link, Rosenstrasse (2003) by Margarethe von Trotta, The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003) by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Tomorrow We Move (2004) by Chantal Akerman, Nina’s Journey (2005) by Lena Einhorn, One Day You’ll Understand (2008) by Amos Gitai, Army of Saviours (2009) by Ludi Boeken, Berlin ’36 (2009) by Kaspar Heidelbach, Lea and Darija (2011) by Branko Ivanda, Remembrance (2011) by Anna Justice, Retrace2 (2011) by Judit Elek, The Third Half (2012) by Darko Mitrevski, Ida (2013) by Paweł Pawlikowski, For a Woman (2013) by Diane Kurys and Anita B. (2014) by Roberto Faenza. Significantly, some of these films are directed by first- or second-generation survivors, including Martine Dugowson, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Chantal Akerman, Lena Einhorn, Judit Elek and Diane Kurys. Other films are based on novels and memoirs written by survivors (Nowhere in Africa, One Day You’ll Understand, Army of Saviours and Anita B.), on testimonies by/about survivors (Berlin ’36, Lea and Darija and The Third Half) or on scripts by second-generation survivors (Rosenstrasse and Remembrance). It is worth noting that nine of these sixteen films were directed by women: Louba’s

90 

I. LEWIS

Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We Move, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance, Retrace and For a Woman. This chapter signals the emergence of Jewish women as Holocaust survivors in contemporary cinema and discusses three of the most relevant examples of this cycle of films, namely, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance and The Birch-Tree Meadow. In particular, it explains how recent films engage with concepts of trauma and vicarious witnessing, while recovering women’s voices and memories in their diversity and uniqueness.

The Emergence of Female Survivors: Beyond Witnessing All of the films mentioned above are connected by two elements: the presence of the female survivor3 and the concept of memory as dialectic between remembering and forgetting. The emergence, in the twenty-first century, of the character of the female survivor is not a random one. Historian Lawrence Baron (2005: 202, 217) acknowledges a growing interest in the topic of survivors, reflected in the fact that it was rated the third most popular theme of Holocaust films in the 1990s. He also further highlights the tendency for more positive portrayals compared to the past. Baron argues that the foregrounding of survivors in cinematic narratives is due to the increasing attention they have generally received over the last decades, starting with the Nobel Prize conferred on Elie Wiesel in 1986, the opening of the US Holocaust Museum in 1993 and the growing number of memoirs and oral testimonies by survivors. Also, the figure of the female survivor that emerges in the Holocaust cinema of the new millennium is undoubtedly related to the anxieties expressed by scholars and survivors alike regarding “the end of the witness era”, which will have its symbolic closure with the death of the last survivor (Vitiello 2011: 8). As the Holocaust recedes into the past and the world contemplates the prospect that the last witnesses will die, films manifest a growing concern with the figure of the survivor as repository of knowledge and memory of the Holocaust. The increasing preoccupation of European Holocaust cinema with the figure of the survivor, and more generally of the witness, is also due to the emphasis on memory in both academia and popular discourse over the last decades. According to Barbie Zelizer (1998: 173), “by the early nineties Holocaust-­related books abounded with titles that incorporated notions of memory”. Marianne Hirsch (2012: 3) connects the emergence of memory as an “analytic term” and its corresponding field of research—Memory Studies—to the work of “second-generation” writers and artists, those who did not experience the atrocities but gained their knowledge through a filial bond with the survivors. Using the term “postmemory”, Hirsch (ibid.) claims that the descendants of survivors who witnessed traumatic events “connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

91

extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not there to live an event”. In a similar vein, Froma Zeitlin (1998: 6) claims that this very belatedness “seems to engender the desire of representing the past through modes of reenactment—even reanimation—through which the self, the ‘ego’ of ‘the one who was not there,’ now takes on a leading role as an active presence”. Examining Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) and Art Spiegelman’s comic Maus, Zeitlin states that these works are both exemplary for the way in which they enable members of the second or third generation to transform the act of witnessing into a “lived performance for witness and listener alike”. According to Zeitlin, two recent Holocaust novels—namely, Henri Raczymow’s Un cri sans voix (1985) and Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz (1992),4— represent “further and even bolder developments” in Holocaust literature towards the experience of the “vicarious witness”. His analysis of the two writings accurately pinpoints the main elements that characterise the experience of the “vicarious witness”. As Zeitlin (1998: 15) explains: Both texts are driven by the compulsion to bear vicarious witness. Both are preoccupied with the problems of reconstructing and recovering memory, which can only be acquired second or third hand, and both stage obsessive quests for knowledge about the Holocaust that entail quite uncommon efforts at identification with others through fictional means. Finally, both foreground the process—the vocation—of writing as the essential means of creating an authorial presence, one that involves the reader throughout in the anguish, the guilt, the necessity, the doubts and contradictions, but also the remedial nature, of the task that is performed in the stance of the self-reflexive or “middle voice”.

Alison Landsberg (2003: 148–149) uses the term “prosthetic memories” to take the relationship between “the one who was not there” and the traumas of the Holocaust even further; as she explains, “it has become possible to have an intimate relationship to memories of events through which one did not live”. Landsberg claims that the prosthetic memories “are indeed ‘personal’ memories, as they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with the mass media’s various technologies of memory”. These memories, which “often mark trauma”, are not any longer confined to a geographical area or to a specific group but widely available to people living in various places. Hirsch’s, Zeitlin’s and Landsberg’s assertions are very useful, as they provoke fundamental questions for this section: to what extent are the sixteen films here concerned with the experience of the “vicarious witness” and, if they are, does this facilitate a stronger “authorial presence” of the writer/director? If films are “producers and disseminators of memory” (Landsberg 2003: 148), whose memory do they express? How are these memories gendered? If cinema is a “key medium in our inheritance of the history and memory of the Holocaust”, how does it articulate its gender dimension (Reading 2002: 178)?

92 

I. LEWIS

Finally, given the affinity between trauma and memory (Traverso and Broderick 2010: 5), how is trauma (en)gendered through “vicarious witnessing”?

Reclaiming Women’s Memories With very few exceptions, European Holocaust cinema had, until the 2000s, taken only tentative steps towards challenging the image of woman as a token of victimhood (Lewis 2017: 256). It is very relevant that all sixteen films discussed narrate their stories using as a device the survivor or a close witness. By comparison, most of the female characters in pre-2000s Holocaust cinema— whether victims or survivors—die at the end of the films. Moreover, they are rarely in the position of being narrators of their own stories: they do not have a voice of their own, being usually defined by their relationship to their male counterparts and portrayed through either a male or an omniscient perspective. The element of voice, as this chapter shall further point out, plays a fundamental role in highlighting the cinematic authorship of the text (Silverman 1988: 48; Doane 1985: 573) and its relation to trauma (Hirsch 2004: 58). The authorial voice is understood here as a “‘discursive subject’ identifiable in the text through the network of different discourses by which it is made up” (Cook 2007a: 461). According to Cook (ibid.: 461–462), the discursive subject is not produced by a person existing independently of the films but by the interaction of discourses. Taking stock of Claire Johnston’s seminal article “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1973), both Cook (2007b: 468–469) and Silverman (1988: 205) point to the importance of auteur theory for feminism and the role of feminist filmmakers in challenging the ideologies of mainstream cinema. By analysing the cases of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, two female directors working within the male-dominated Hollywood system, Johnston claims that female authorial discourse can challenge and disrupt patriarchal ideologies. Kaja Silverman’s and Mary Ann Doane’s theories on the role of voice in assigning female authorship and Joshua Hirsch’s analysis of posttraumatic cinema with the use of three parameters (tense, mood and voice) were employed to determine to what extent this cycle of films engages with traumatic memories and succeeds in establishing the authorial presence of the female witness or survivor. In relation to the use of voice in the film, Silverman claims that through the technique of synchronisation, classic films suppress women’s voices and reduce them to the status of object. The voiceover, instead, is able to reclaim the female voice on an authorial level, as outside the diegesis and therefore “a voice that speaks from a position of superior knowledge, and which superimposes itself ‘on top’ of the diegesis” (Silverman 1988: 48). In a similar vein, Doane (1985: 572–573) argues that by “by-passing the ‘characters’” the voiceover speaks directly to the spectator and refers to him/her as “an empty space to be ‘filled’ with knowledge about the events”. This analysis starts with the premise that memories and the narratives used to present them are all gendered (Bos 2003: 34). Unlike oral and written tes-

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

93

timonies, fictional films do not necessarily provide a direct correspondence between the memories of a survivor and their representation. In relation to Holocaust fictional writings, Lillian Kremer (1999: 3–4) suggestively points out that the work of male authors “reflects their male experience and perspective” and neglects the gender-related experiences of women. As she further claims: “Not until we turn to women’s texts do we encounter the depth and breadth of women’s Holocaust experience.” When examining cinematic representations, the relation between gender and memory is much more complex and multifaceted, because the testimony or fiction by a survivor is mediated by the work of the male or female filmmaker. Thus, screening the adaptation of a female survivor’s memoir or of her oral testimony does not guarantee a female perspective on the events that are depicted. A case in point is the film mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, The Third Half, based on the true story of Neta Koen, one of the few Jews who survived the persecution in Macedonia. That symbolic scene seems to suggest that the film engages deeply in representing Rebecca’s memories and Holocaust experiences (see Fig. 6.1). This assumption is totally misleading, however, as the focus shifts from her love story with a non-Jew and the way she eschewed the persecution by concealing her identity, towards the incredible account of the victory achieved by the national soccer team. The film takes the opportunity to provide a general overview of the persecution of Jews and Gypsies in Macedonia. As a consequence, although it starts promisingly with an aged Rebecca embarking on the trip to Skopje and remembering the past in a flashback lasting almost the entire film, Rebecca’s story loses its focus and recedes into the background as soon as she gets married in the first half of the film. Her protagonist role is relegated to a passive witness position in a story told from an omniscient perspective. The only voice off towards the end of the film is contained within the diegesis, announcing the closure of the story and the return to the present for the epilogue. Similar observations can be made by examining five other films directed by male filmmakers (One Day You’ll Understand, Army of Saviours, Berlin ’36, Ida and Anita B.). Despite each having a female survivor in the leading role, the structure of these films undermines their voices and memories. For example, two of these productions (Army of Saviours and Berlin ’36) insert brief sequences featuring the real-life survivor who inspired the film. Yet the presence, in the films, of both Marga Spiegel and Gretel Bergmann goes against the grain since, instead of making the story personal, the scene has exactly the opposite effect. Marga Spiegel seems slightly confused, looking around and asking: “It’s all done now, isn’t it?” She does not seem comfortable or believable on the set of a film meant to represent her own memories. On the other hand, Gretel Bergmann, maintaining the same line as the film, emphasises the difficult fate of her colleague Marie Kettler, as a man forced into being a woman, and does not engage much in her own survival story. The omniscient perspective, the lack of a female narrator and the inability to evoke trauma prevent these films from foregrounding a female perspective and from engaging with women’s memories.

94 

I. LEWIS

An exceptional case is the male-directed film Lea and Darija, which uses the voiceover of the main protagonist as a narrative device. In spite of giving the female protagonist a voice that narrates the whole story, we are reminded that the thirteen-year-old Lea is just a “ghost”, since she died years ago, on the train to Auschwitz. The film script does not represent “her” memories but the recollections of different people about her transformed into a story by Branko Ivanda. Moreover, the off-screen self-narrator is strongly questioned by the elderly Darija, the witness of the film, who claims that she remembers everything except Lea, implying that Lea never existed. Despite depicting the lives of protagonist Jewish women during the Holocaust, One Day You’ll Understand, Army of Saviours, Berlin ’36, Lea and Darija, The Third Half, Ida and Anita B. seem to indicate the failure of filmmakers to engage, at a deeper level, with the representation of women’s experiences and to give a voice to their memories.

Whose Memories? Gender and Authorial Voice in Holocaust Films By contrast, Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We Move, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance and For a Woman— all made by female directors—offer a clear female perspective through the use of voiceover, flashbacks and subjective shots. Although the number of these female-directed films is relatively small, their impact on recent Holocaust cinema is noteworthy. Interestingly, the twenty-first century has witnessed an unprecedented wave of female directors in European Holocaust cinema,5 as Table 6.1 shows. Between 2001 and 2014, women directed 21 films about the Holocaust, a number that surpasses all European productions by female directors since the immediate aftermath of the war (20 films). However, not all Holocaust films by female directors that have been released since 2001 are explicitly concerned with women’s memories, exhibiting a variety of topics and approaches to the subject of the Holocaust. Moreover, if one has to consider how pre-contemporary Holocaust cinema has approached its Table 6.1  Holocaust films directed or co-directed by women

Decade 2011–2014 2001–2010 1991–2000 1981–1990 1971–1980 1961–1970 1951–1960 1945–1950 Total Source: The author

Number of films 11 10 6 7 3 2 1 1 41

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

95

female characters, there are several contrasting examples of men doing feminist films and of women filmmakers who have internalised traditional patriarchal perspectives. It is worth mentioning here the German film The Nasty Girl (1990) by Michael Verhoeven as an excellent example of a film that prioritises a feminist female perspective. Verhoeven invests the main character of the film, Sonja, with a strong authorial voice, which not only narrates the events through voiceover but also intervenes from outside the film as an alter-ego of the filmmaker himself. Similarly, Charlotte S. (1981), directed by Frans Weisz, frequently uses flashback and voiceover techniques to deliver a powerful feminist message through the character and life story of German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon. At the other end of the spectrum are films such as The Night Porter (1974) by Liliana Cavani and Angry Harvest (1985) by Agnieszka Holland, which, despite being made by female directors, reinforce the dominant, male perspective in narrating women’s experiences during the Holocaust. These examples challenge the assumption that men’s films definitely present neutral perspectives and address universal truths, while women’s films are inevitably feminist and expected to speak for all women. However, although it cannot be hypothesised that female directors, unlike their male counterparts, are generally more insightful and exhibit a feminist perspective when depicting women’s experiences during the Holocaust, this correlation holds with respect to the films analysed in this chapter. Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We Move, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance and For a Woman exhibit a deep engagement with women’s memories, which are narrated from a strong, authorial female perspective. These authors resurrect the female authorial voice in their films by using narrative voiceover (Louba’s Ghosts, Nowhere in Africa, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Nina’s Journey and Remembrance), subjective shots and flashbacks (Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, Nowhere in Africa, Nina’s Journey and Remembrance) and characters that represent the alter-ego of the filmmaker6 (Louba’s Ghosts, The Birch-Tree Meadow, Tomorrow We Move and For a Woman). According to Silverman (1988: 215), the presence of a fictional character who “stands in” for the filmmaker is one of the ways in which cinematic authorship can be inscribed in the text. Moreover, some of the filmmakers in question here, such as Chantal Akerman, Diane Kurys, Margarethe von Trotta and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, are well known for their engagement with feminist cinema. Importantly, this cycle of recent films by female directors highlights how contemporary understandings of gender have influenced the way we narrate the past. Firstly, these films adopt a significantly more sophisticated understanding of gender, which acknowledges the specificity of women’s suffering during the Holocaust without resorting to biological essentialist constructions of the feminine. On the contrary, these films provide a feminist analysis of women’s gendered suffering at the hands of the patriarchy. Secondly, at a more metatextual level, the contemporary films draw attention to the socially constructed nature of gender and emphasise the inequity of gender relations by challenging male accounts of history. In the light of these assertions, the emer-

96 

I. LEWIS

gence of a feminist perspective in contemporary European Holocaust cinema supports Kremer’s (1999) contention that male written memoirs do not do justice to women’s experiences.

Engendering Trauma Through “Vicarious Witnessing” While there is no doubt about the strong feminist perspective embedded in the films discussed above, they differ greatly in their ability to engage with trauma and to instil the experience of the “vicarious witness”, which, I argue, can be visualised as three concentric circles (see Fig.  6.2). In this figure, the films located at the outermost level, namely, For a Woman and Tomorrow We Move, are those that least invite the viewer to engage with memories of the Holocaust on a personal level. At the middle level are films that, through significant use of flashbacks, subjective camera and voiceover, encourage the audience to explore and engage with personal memories of the Holocaust, thus opening up the possibility of experiencing vicarious witnessing. Furthermore, at the core of the three concentric circles is The Birch-Tree Meadow, which is an excellent example of how women filmmakers can engender trauma in a powerful and compelling way. At the external level, the farthest from reaching the “vicarious witness”, are Chantal Akerman’s Tomorrow We Move and Diane Kurys’ For a Woman. Tomorrow We Move, directed by a second-generation survivor, reflects much of Hirsch’s (2012: 5) concept of postmemory, in which the connection with the past is “mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation”. Its main character, and Akerman’s alter-ego, is Charlotte, a writer of erotic stories living with her mother, a Holocaust survivor. The film is permeated by Holocaust symbolism, although neither the word Jew nor Holocaust is

For a Woman

Nowhere in Africa

Rosenstrasse

Nina’s Journey The Birch-Tree Meadow

Remembrance

Louba’s Ghosts ove

Tomorrow We M

Fig. 6.2  The “vicarious witness” experience in female-directed films. (Source: The author)

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

97

ever mentioned in the film. In this sense, the thick smoke in the house is a reminder of the crematoriums, the disinfectant smell is a similar metaphor for the camps, the empty fridge recalls the hunger in the camps and the constant obsession with moving away can be read as suggesting deportation. It is ­arguable that the construction of the narrative through such highly metaphorical language might be too cryptic for mainstream filmgoers and detract from experiencing the trauma. It is worth noting that the same actress, Sylvie Testud, represents both Akerman’s alter-ego in Tomorrow We Move and, nine years later, Diane Kurys’ alter-ego Anne in For a Woman. Kurys’ autobiographical film is concerned with exploring the filmmaker’s own roots and identity. The film moves back and forth from the present to the past, between Anne’s engagement with memory paralleled by the writing of the film script and her parents’ love story located in the aftermath of the war. The Holocaust is invoked several times, since her (Jewish) parents meet while interned in Rivesaltes camp in France from which they managed to get free, avoiding deportation. While Akerman addresses the subject of survivors’ silence and its effects on the second generation, Kurys completely avoids deepening the Holocaust subject and focuses primarily on the love story and later divorce of her parents. The topic of the Holocaust is thus left suspended and the spectator is given no further information about her parents’ experiences during that time. It can be argued here that, by using high symbolism in Tomorrow We Move and by placing the Holocaust experiences of Kurys’ parents out of focus in For a Woman, the two films fail to render Holocaust memories accessible and do not encourage the viewer to engage with the past.

Journeys Through Memory: Seeing the Past in Remembrance and Nina’s Journey At the second (middle) level of the three concentric circles (see Fig. 6.2) are Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, Nowhere in Africa, Nina’s Journey and Remembrance. These five films draw their inspiration from varied sources: the semi-biographical novel of a survivor in exile, Stefanie Zweig (Nowhere in Africa); a script based on real events and written by Pamela Katz,7 a second-­ generation survivor (Rosenstrasse and Remembrance); and personal autobiographical material from second-generation filmmakers (Louba’s Ghosts and Nina’s Journey). The Holocaust is explicitly described as the films develop between two temporal dimensions, the past and the present. Along with the use of voiceover and a subjective point of view, these posttraumatic narratives employ extensive flashbacks. If in Nowhere in Africa and Nina’s Journey it is the classic, biographical flashback which narrates life in retrospective (Hirsch 2004: 94), Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse and Remembrance adopt the posttraumatic flashback. The “posttraumatic flashback”, unlike the classic one, is used “to create a disturbance not only at the level of content, by presenting a painful fictional memory, but also at the level of form”. This type of flashback registers

98 

I. LEWIS

“the actual disturbances of traumatic experience” determining “an analogue posttraumatic consciousness in the spectator” (ibid.: 99). The most relevant example for this second-level circle is certainly Remembrance, directed by German filmmaker Anna Justice. The film, inspired by true events, has as protagonist Hannah, a Jewish woman in her fifties living in New York with her family. The past is triggered by a television programme in which she recognises her fiancé during the war, Tomasz, whom she thought was dead. The two met in a concentration camp, fell in love and managed to escape the camp and survive against all odds in hiding. Told in flashbacks, the film unfolds between present and past, from 1976 in New York and 1944 in Poland. The painful experience of remembrance is suggestively expressed by Hannah’s voiceover at the beginning of the film: “A memory does not come whole; it’s torn from the start. The edges are piercing and sharp. They pierce the skin and make you bleed.” The past narrative has a fast-cut rhythm, depicting the vulnerable life in the camp and later the rushed events due to their fugitive status, while Hannah’s present is described through slow camera movements. The tumult of events is now repositioned from the outside to the inside, as Hannah is overwhelmed by contradictory feelings and torn apart between two worlds. The close-up shots coupled with long silences that contemplate Hannah’s facial expressions are suggestive of her inner agony as she tries to make sense of the past and to understand. Her memories are vivid and tormenting: “I’m haunted by memories that refuse to be forgotten. I try to hide, but they always find me. I thought I was finished with the past, done. But you’re never done.” The camera boldly insists on highlighting details that emphasise her distress: the breathlessness as she finds out Tomasz might be alive, the hands trembling as she looks through the Red Cross file, the eyes filled with tears and the voice cut by emotion when she speaks with Tomasz. Hannah’s experience in Remembrance echoes much of Charlotte Delbo’s concept of “deep memory”, which “reminds us that Auschwitz past is not really past and never will be” (Langer 1995: xi). Lawrence Langer (ibid.) highlights Delbo’s suggestive words that claim the unaltered permanence of traumatic memories: “Auschwitz is so deeply etched on my memory,” she wrote, “that I cannot forget one moment of it. So you are living with Auschwitz? No, I live next to it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self.”

Similar to Charlotte Delbo’s account, Hannah’s deep memory “pierces the skin”, taking hold of the present. The past that invades Hannah’s present is suggested through the powerful image of young Tomasz in her apartment in New York, closely watching Hannah as she reopens the search by calling the Red Cross. Tomasz’s haunting presence is more than a memory: he seems to be there, in his striped uniform, smoking nervously by the window, declaring

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

99

Fig. 6.3  Tomasz’s ghost from the past, dressed in a striped uniform, invades Hannah’s present in Anna Justice’s Remembrance (2011)

his love for her or gulping down the food on the table during a party at her house (see Fig. 6.3). Importantly, Hannah is the only one who is able to see the ghost from the past, while he is invisible to all other characters such as her husband, her daughter or the guests in their house. Tomasz’s ghost cohabiting a dual temporary space engenders a schizophrenic duality in Hannah: she is no longer able to live in the present without confronting her past. It is worth noting that both in his ghostly appearances and in Hannah’s flashbacks from the past, Tomasz is portrayed in much more detail than his aged counterpart, who is shown only briefly. Suggestively, during their phone conversation 30 years later, Hannah is filmed in frontal close-up, capturing all her rich expressions, while Tomasz’s face is not shown, since the shots are taken from the side. Tomasz remains until the end a figure whom the audience knows only through Hannah’s mediation. Remembrance, similarly to the other four films in this second-level circle, manifests a strong engagement with women’s memories during the Holocaust, from a first-hand or postmemory perspective. However, many of the trauma and identification mechanisms in all five films are created through the use of musical underscores, melodramatic tones and happy endings marked by reconciliation. Another significant example from the second-level circle of vicarious witness experience is Nina’s Journey. “I’m very contented; I feel I’ve had a very good life, a very good life” are the words that the elderly Nina Einhorn pronounces at the end of the film, as a sort of epilogue to her incredible story of survival

100 

I. LEWIS

and her life journey in Poland, Denmark and finally Sweden. Directed by her daughter, Lena Einhorn, the film is clearly intended to document and preserve the mother’s memories. As the epilogue states, the interview with Nina Einhorn, which is integrated into the fiction film, was shot a month after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 1999. Since Nina passed away three years before the release of the film in 2005, it represents a symbolic testament of her performing one last journey through the memories of her “very good life”. Nina’s presence throughout the film, in the interview fragments or as a voiceover narrating it, gives authenticity and authority to the story. The film is structured on a chronology of events that interweaves historical data with life events in Nina’s family. Through newsreel footage, Lena Einhorn captures many of the realities of war and the atrocities of persecution: the daily life of people in Warsaw, poverty, ruins, destruction, the German occupation, the building of the ghetto walls, children begging or smuggling food into the ghetto and so on. The footage enhances the credibility of the story, especially when paralleled with scenes that re-create similar situations. The film narrates Nina’s story of an ordinary girl coming of age in extraordinary circumstances, and Polish actress Agnieszka Grochowska as young Nina is adept at portraying the lightness and energy that will help Nina to survive against all odds. What is particularly important in the film is that Nina’s character is defined and portrayed in symbiosis with the figure of her mother, Fanja. The mother is a very important presence throughout the film and represents a reference point for Nina, who matures from a sensitive and childish girl into a strong woman like her mother. It is important to note that the portrayal of mother and daughter gradually evolves in opposite directions: while Nina grows stronger, Fanja’s personality fades away, finally turning into a scared, “invisible” person. Her invisibility is suggested by the fact that in her last appearance in the film, she is hiding in a closet, humbled and disturbed. The journey in the cart from Łódź to Warsaw which opens the film marks the beginning of the two characters’ metamorphosis. The opening phrase, narrated by aged Nina Einhorn, reveals that Nina has never been hugged by her mother until that memorable three-day journey by cart, in the searing cold, towards Warsaw. As Nina explains, her mother had a very strong personality and she seldom expressed her feelings. Fanja’s gesture of tenderness towards her daughter is complemented by a request for forgiveness. When Nina asks what she has to forgive her for, the voiceover intentionally covers their discussion. Fanja’s answer is in fact unimportant, since the crux of this scene lies in the start of a transforming relationship between the two. With the progressive worsening of their situation as they move into the Warsaw ghetto, Fanja becomes more and more vulnerable and weak, while Nina, the fragile girl, gradually changes into a strong, well-defined character. One episode clearly emphasises this role reversal between mother and daughter: while Fanja is ill in bed, Nina sneaks home from work to nurture her sick mother. When Fanja’s

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

101

health is finally restored, she becomes apathetic and refuses to leave her bed and assume her responsibilities. Aware that this situation might cause them to lose their jobs in the factory, which in the ghetto context would be equal to a death sentence, Nina scolds her mother in a moment of despair. The elderly Nina Einhorn comments on this memory: “It was the first time I’d ever shouted at my mother and I got her onto her feet.” From this moment on, it is increasingly evident that Nina assumes the leading role in the mother-daughter relationship. Given the film’s emphasis on that relationship, the title Nina’s Journey can be read both as Nina’s journey from Holocaust to life and as the journey of rediscovery of a deep relationship between Nina and her mother. In fact, Nina’s father and brother are present throughout the film, but their roles are less important than the two female characters. In a very symbolic way, the film’s opening and ending point to this relationship between Nina and Fanja: from the cart-driven trip to Warsaw when the two women hug each other for the first time, their relationship and characters have undergone a huge transformation. The film ends with Nina returning to her parents’ house to find, in the emptiness of their apartment, a photo of her mother, hidden at the back of a drawer. The two are reunited beyond death, as Fanja lives now through Nina. Ultimately, the title points to the last, tributary journey through the memories of an aged Nina Einhorn towards the end of her life. This film is located at the middle level of the three concentric circles representing the vicarious witness experience (see Fig. 6.2) for two reasons. Firstly, the continuous sliding of the narrative between documentary footage, present-­ time interview and fictional reconstruction of the past detracts from involving the audience in the effort to identify with Nina’s experience. Although highly preoccupied with the process of recovering and preserving memory, the fragmented structure hinders the transmission of trauma as a vicarious experience. Secondly, the didactic tone of the film and the extensive use of classic (as opposed to posttraumatic) flashback render the whole experience of vicarious witnessing less effective. The biographical flashback widely used in Nina’s Journey is intended to tell the story retrospectively and, throughout the film, is framed in the present by the visual figure of the elderly survivor. As Joshua Hirsch (2004: 93–94) explains, in contrast to posttraumatic flashback (encountered in Remembrance), this type of classic flashback is pre-announced by elements of plot and dialogue. Thus, by appealing didactically to the spectator, the painful fictional memory does not encourage an analogue posttraumatic experience in her/him.

Case Study: The Birch-Tree Meadow (Marceline Loridan-Ivens, 2003) The autobiographical film The Birch-Tree Meadow holds a distinctive place at the centre of the three concentric circles in Fig.  6.2. Directed by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a French Jewish filmmaker aged 75 at the release of the film, it

102 

I. LEWIS

is the fruit of her experience as a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. As Loridan-Ivens points out in an interview, the film overcomes her long-lasting silence and responds to the “duty” to speak of survivors before their passing from this life: I have let so many years pass before bringing my own contribution to that living memorial of the Holocaust made up from the memories of those who survived it, simply because for all that time I was incapable of doing it. As a person, like so many other survivors, [I thought] it was better to remain silent. But today, as an artist, although I truly fear that I don’t have the capacity, I know I have the duty to express myself and add my voice to those of people who have had the courage to speak before the death of the last survivor sends the camps into the realm of History once and for all.8

This statement is very significant, as it highlights the self-reflexive tone of the film. It is worth noting that what sets The Birch-Tree Meadow apart from all the other films discussed so far is not only the presence of the survivor, whose first-hand memories are at the source of both the script and the direction, but also the particular style of the film, which refuses to re-create the past visually. The Birch-Tree Meadow re-enacts the Holocaust not in a staged reconstruction, as most films do, but by evoking names, stories and sensations through the voice off and sometimes disembodied voiceover of the main character, Myriam Rosenberg, who returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau after fifty years. Since the film does not try to reconstruct the past at a visual level, it does so in a very powerful way through the soundtrack. The unrepresented past is felt through the evocative power of remembrance as Myriam recalls her long-lost memories one by one. In one of the first scenes in the camp, while the camera captures in a long shot Myriam walking away on the abandoned train tracks leading to Auschwitz, the disembodied voiceover narrates the story of her arrival at the camp, aged fifteen, when she was saved from the first selection for the gas chambers by a girl named Françoise. In a second moment, entering her former barrack, Myriam pronounces the names of all her roommates, looking at their beds as if she could see them. Her memories become alive through voices off from the past: at times, she enters into a dialogue with these ghost-like voices or she listens to them in a contemplative moment. In a particularly evocative scene, one can distinctly hear the women chatting about food, listing their favourite dishes and picturing in detail the meals they would like to have. Their voices fill the empty spaces of the present, rendering memory vivid and actual. Significantly, within the context of the Final Solution, “food talk” had a strong gendered dimension, being used by women to preserve their dignity and to socialise (Goldenberg 2003: 164). The past comes alive not only for Myriam but for the audience too, which witnesses these fragments of memories and tries to piece together the puzzle of stories. In a discussion at the beginning of the film with Suzanne, another survivor with whom she shared the barrack as an inmate, Myriam poses a challenging

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

103

question: “You see we don’t have the same memories. And what can guarantee me that it is you who are right?” The issue of non-coinciding memories between female survivors who lived through the same event surfaces throughout the film as a recurrent motif. Myriam does not accept the fact that, with the passing of time, her memories might be blurred and imprecise. “I have my memories!” she exclaims, where the pronoun “my” claims a personal relationship with her own past. Myriam’s disagreement with other two women survivors who lived through the same exact experience echoes the words of Joan Ringelheim, one of the pioneers of a gendered differentiated approach to the Holocaust. Ringelheim totally opposes the concept of the “sameness” of the Jewish experience, claiming the uniqueness of memories and experiences: “There is no time, there is no place that is the same for everyone, not even Auschwitz” (Ringelheim 1990: 143). Moreover, the issue of non-coinciding memories between survivors points to the inability of memory to restore the past entirely for those who have experienced trauma. Janet Walker (2005: 4) defines this process as the “traumatic paradox”, in which “forgetting and mistakes in memory may actually stand, therefore, as testament to the genuine nature of the event a person is trying to recall”. Myriam’s incessant search for a meadow between the birch trees where, years ago, she had to dig pits and bury the bodies from the crematorium is thus very significant in the film. Tormented by this gap in memory, she returns a few times to the meadow, draws a map of the place and confronts her memories with other survivors. At a metaphorical level, “the birch-tree meadow” (the title of the film and also the literal translation into English of the word “Birkenau”) does not refer to a specific location within the camp structure or the name of the concentration camp but is a metaphor for the “place” where no two memories are the same. The encounter in Auschwitz-Birkenau between Myriam and Oskar, the grandson of a former SS member who worked in the camp, has a very significant role in the film (see Fig. 6.4). Oskar claims that he is trying to capture the tracks of the past objectively, by taking photos. Myriam’s reply—diametrically opposed to Oskar’s—“I’m looking for the invisible” is very suggestive of her constant oscillation between present and past. The walls, the barbed wire, the surveillance towers, the barracks, the bunk beds, the latrines, the overgrown grass covering the whole area of the camp, all become invisible testimonies of a haunting past as Myriam discloses her memories, caught between the will to remember and the desire to forget. The audience is deeply involved in this act of searching for the invisible traces of the past in Auschwitz and in the struggle of the protagonist to remember the facts and the places. The polarity between visible/invisible and the two different quests for the past are indicative of the tension between history and memory. For Myriam, the invisible is the memory and those voices from the past that only she can hear. The visible and objective tracks that Oskar claims represent history and its factual authority. Traditionally history, seen as male, based on logic and order, is considered to be the opposite of memory, deemed feminine, irrational and unable to guarantee veracity (Reading 2002: 32). In the film, Oskar knows the

104 

I. LEWIS

Fig. 6.4  The encounter between Myriam and Oskar, symbolising the dichotomy between memory and history, in Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003)

camp by heart and is able to explain the significance of each room in the Birkenau Museum. On the signpost to it, Myriam erases the word “Museum” and replaces it with “camp”. In The Birch-Tree Meadow, the relationship between history and memory is reversed: it is not the history but the memory which holds the key to first-hand experience. History, factual and objective, is replaced by memory, albeit fragmented and subjective, disrupted and incongruous, thus reclaiming the precedence of women’s voices and memories over male-dominated histories of the Holocaust. The Birch-Tree Meadow bears stylistic resemblances to the documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, considered by Hirsch (2004: 41) “the founding text of the posttraumatic cinema”. Through its long silences and the absence of reconstructions of the past, its self-consciousness and the subjective point of view of the traumatised witness, the film establishes the same kind of posttraumatic “dialectic of memory and forgetting, of vision and blindness, of the necessity and impossibility of representing historical trauma” (Hirsch 2004: 61–62). Because it is devoid of images from the past and draws heavily on sound and imagination, it challenges the spectator to assume an active role, to undertake his/her own struggle with the past and to become the “vicarious witness”.

Conclusion The sixteen films that are the subject of this chapter differ greatly in terms of style, narrative, tone and engagement with the past: from the black and white of Ida to the green-blue tones of The Birch-Tree Meadow, and from the omni-

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

105

scient perspective in Anita B. to the highly subjective point of view in Remembrance. Nina’s Journey uses a quasi-documentary format, blending survivor interview and newsreel within the narrative, while commercial Academy Award-winning productions such as Nowhere in Africa are more melodramatic. The films also depict or make reference to a broad range of Holocaust experiences: in ghettos (Nina’s Journey), in concentration camps (The Birch-Tree Meadow, Remembrance, For a Woman and Anita B.), in hiding (Rosenstrasse, Nina’s Journey, Army of Saviours, Remembrance, The Third Half and Ida) and in exile (Nowhere in Africa). Three enhance the truthfulness of the film by the presence of the now elderly, real-life survivor at the end (Army of Saviours and Berlin ’36) or throughout (Nina’s Journey). Despite their stylistic and narrative diversity, what these films all have in common is an interest in retrieving women’s experiences and memories in relation to the Holocaust. They all endeavour, albeit with different degrees of success, to foreground “women” as a distinct category of victim, no longer incorporated within the male historical canon. This process set in place by Holocaust cinema in the twenty-first century is unique and important in many ways. Firstly, this unprecedented foregrounding of women’s experiences and memories raises important questions in relation to the impact that such films have on the collective memory of the Holocaust and public perceptions of women’s suffering. In particular, by placing women’s experiences under the spotlight, contemporary cinema counteracts Fuchs’ paradigm of “vicarious victims”, whereas the tendency of previous films was to depict women as affected by the horrors of the Holocaust only indirectly, as wives and mothers of male victims (Fuchs 1999: 50). In doing so, it provides the “missing element” of an “incomplete picture” in relation to the Holocaust (Weitzman and Ofer 1998: 1). Secondly, if we refer strictly to the eight films directed by women—namely, The Birch-Three Meadow, Nina’s Journey, Remembrance, Louba’s Ghosts, Rosenstrasse, Nowhere in Africa, Tomorrow We Move and For a Woman—they not only cast women in protagonist roles, but endeavour to portray them in a highly insightful and compelling way. In narrating the Holocaust experiences of women, these feminist filmmakers prioritise their voices and perspectives by making women articulate protagonists of their own stories. This tendency can be read as an attempt to give women back their long-lost voices and to contrast what Ronit Lentin (2000: 693) has called the “deafening silence” that for decades neutralised the stories of women in a gender-blind perspective. Furthermore, through the extensive use of voiceover and flashbacks, these films have a remarkable ability to evoke trauma and to s(t)imulate the experience of vicarious witnessing. This is the case for Nina’s Journey and Remembrance, which, by using the biographical, specifically the posttraumatic flashback, invite their viewers to engage with the memories of the Holocaust from a very intimate perspective. Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ masterpiece The Birch-Tree Meadow facilitates even more of an experientially oriented encounter, because it mediates telling of the filmmaker’s own story as a survivor while eschewing any re-creation of the past. The viewer is thus challenged to bear

106 

I. LEWIS

vicarious witness through an “obsessive quest” (Zeitlin 1998) for that knowledge that would fill with imagination the gaps in Myriam’s failing memory. Ultimately, the emergence of this important cycle of films in the twenty-first century needs to be flagged and acknowledged, because it challenges the patriarchal ideologies that had previously characterised Holocaust cinema.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Comparing the films Remembrance and The Birch-Tree Meadow, identify and discuss the experiences of women in a concentration camp. 2. Explain the tension between history and memory. Do you think these two concepts complement each other? Can they be in conflict? 3. Using the Online Film Database of Yad Vashem, can you find any examples of Holocaust films that approach the concept of memory from a male perspective? 4. Focusing on the difference between the classic and posttraumatic flashback, explain their use in other Holocaust films not mentioned in this chapter. 5. Perform a textual analysis of Branko Ivanda’s film Lea and Darija. 6. Define and explain the concept of postmemory. What examples can you provide for its application to film?

Notes 1. According to Suleiman, the 1.5 generation represents the “child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews”, Susan Rubin Suleiman. 2002. The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust. American Imago 59, no. 3: 277–295. 2. The film Retrace (2011) by the Hungarian filmmaker Judit Elek had a limited release in the cinemas of Eastern Europe, and it is not available in DVD format. Because of the unsuccessful attempts to source this film for viewing, it will be taken into account in my research only for numerical purposes, without being analysed. 3. In the Croatian film Lea and Darija, the Jewish female character does not survive, but she is present as ghostly voice that haunts her best friend from childhood who, now at old age, is immersed into oblivion. 4. The novels have also been published in English with the following titles: Writing the Book of Esther (1995) by Henri Raczymow and The Final Station: Umschlagplatz (1994) by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz. 5. In the 2000s, there are other Holocaust films by women filmmakers that do not fit in the topic discussed here. 6. See also the interviews with Martine Dugowson (http://www.objectif-cinema. com/interviews/030.php), Marceline Loridan-Ivens (http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=AdXZisN0EXg); Chantal Akerman (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KDCjAjYDasw); and Diane Kurys (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2bp6IqAznXQ). (Accessed 3 September 2014).

6  THE TRAUMA OF (POST)MEMORY: WOMEN’S MEMORIES IN HOLOCAUST… 

107

7. Niedan, Christian. 2014. Pamela Katz on Hannah Arendt. Camera in the Sun. http://camerainthesun.com/?p=24233. Accessed 3 September 2014. 8. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 2009. Marceline Loridan-Ivens. Jewish Women’s Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/loridan-ivens-marceline. Accessed 3 September 2014.

References Akerman, Chantal. 2012. Chantal Akerman raconte Un Divan à New York. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww14Mn7fUuo. Accessed 3 September 2014. Baron, Lawrence. 2005. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Bos, Pascale Rachel. 2003. Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference. In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, 23–50. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Cook, Pam. 2007a. Auteur Study After Structuralism. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook, 460–466. London: British Film Institute. ———. 2007b. Auteurism and Women Directors. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook, 468–473. London: British Film Institute. Doane, Mary Ann. 1985. The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space. In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols, 565–576. Berkeley; Los Angeles; and London: University of California Press. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 2009. Marceline Loridan-Ivens. Jewish Women’s Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/loridan-ivens-marceline. Accessed 3 September 2014. Fuchs, Esther. 1999. Images of Women in Holocaust Films. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 17 (2): 49–56. Goldenberg, Myrna. 2003. Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps. In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, ed. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, 161–179. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hirsch, Joshua. 2004. After Image: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Johnston, Claire. 1973. Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema. In Notes on Women’s Cinema, ed. Claire Johnston, 24–31. London: Society for Education of Film and Television. Kremer, Lillian S. 1999. Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kurys, Diane with Judy Gelman Myers. 2014. New Jewish Cinema. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bp6IqAznXQ. Accessed 3 September 2014. Landsberg, Alison. 2003. Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture. In Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge, 144–161. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Langer, Lawrence L. 1995. Introduction. In Auschwitz and After, ed. Charlotte Delbo, ix–xviii. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

108 

I. LEWIS

Lentin, Ronit. 2000. Expected to Live: Women Shoah Survivors’ Testimonials of Silence. Women’s Studies International 23 (6): 689–700. Lewis, Ingrid. 2017. Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Loridan-Ivens, Marceline. 2013. Dialogues de cinéastes: Marceline Loridan-Ivens parle de La Petite Prairie aux Bouleaux. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AdXZisN0EXg. Accessed 3 September 2014. Meflah, Nadia, and Bernard Payen. 2001. Interview with Martine Dugowson. Objectif Cinema. http://www.objectif-cinema.com/interviews/030.php. Accessed 3 September 2014. Niedan, Christian. 2014. Pamela Katz on Hannah Arendt. Camera in the Sun. http:// camerainthesun.com/?p=24233. Accessed 3 September 2014. Raczymow, Henri. 1995. Writing the Book of Esther. New York: Holmes & Meier. Reading, Anna. 2002. The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ringelheim, Joan. 1990. Thoughts About Women and the Holocaust. In Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb, 141–149. Mahwah: Paulist Press. Rymkiewicz, Jarosław Marek. 1994. The Final Station: Umschlagplatz. New  York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2002. The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust. American Imago 59 (3): 277–295. Traverso, Antonio, and Mick Broderick. 2010. Interrogating Trauma: Towards a Critical Trauma Studies. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24 (1): 3–15. Vitiello, Guido. 2011. Il testimone immaginario: Auschwitz, cinema e la cultura pop. Santa Maria Capua Vetere: Ipermedium libri. Walker, Janet. 2005. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Weitzman, Lenore J., and Dalia Ofer. 1998. The Role of Gender in the Holocaust. In Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, 1–18. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Zeitlin, Froma I. 1998. The Vicarious Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature. History and Memory 20 (2): 5–42. Zelizer, Barbie. 1998. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 7

An Ordinary Warrior and His Inevitable Defeat: Representation in Post-Yugoslav Cinema Dino Murtic

Definitions Yugoslavia Imagined in the nineteenth century as a cultural and political space for South Slavs, the first Yugoslav state was formed on the ashes of WWI. Ruled by the Serbian royal family, the first Yugoslavia ceased to exist during WWII. In the post-WWII Communist era, Yugoslavia was re-established as a federation of six republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia). During forty-five years of Communist totalitarian rule, Yugoslavia and its citizens witnessed an unprecedented era of peace and economic progress. The 1990s Yugoslav Wars Political changes in post-Berlin Wall Europe resulted in the rise of nationalism and separatist tendencies amongst the republics within the Yugoslav federation, and the Yugoslav wars of secession followed. The war first broke out in Slovenia in 1991, then moved quickly to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and lasted until 1995. In 1998, a new war front opened in Kosovo. The last conflict in the territory once known as Yugoslavia happened in Macedonia in 2001. Some estimates put the number killed in the Yugoslav Wars at 140,000.

D. Murtic (*) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_7

109

110 

D. MURTIC

Balkanisation Balkanisation signifies an irrational and potentially violent fragmentation of a geopolitical entity into smaller regions or states. The idea was introduced into political and academic discourse after the collapse of Ottoman Empire rule in the Balkan Peninsula at the beginning of the twentieth century and the consequent set of conflicts between newly formed national states. Balkanisation was revived at the end of the twentieth century, due to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Yugoslav Cinema Once a vibrant and vivid artistic reflection on Yugoslav ideological and sociocultural progress, Yugoslav cinema ceased to exist with the violent disintegration of the Yugoslav federation at the end of the twentieth century. Yugoslav cinema has had several phases of development and consequent movements, the most prominent being the ‘Partisan War Film’, which, by and large, offered a one-sided perspective on the events of WWII in Yugoslav territories. The other significant development within Yugoslav cinema is the Black Wave movement (1960s–early 1970s), acknowledged for its innovative approach to filmmaking and critical examination of Yugoslav society as ruled by authoritarian Communists. Post-Yugoslav Cinema This describes filmmaking that has crossed the ethno-national borders created from the ashes of the Yugoslav federation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, post-Yugoslav cinema is established through coproductions between newly established national cinemas. On the other hand, and more significantly, post-Yugoslav cinema depicts discursive practices that challenge nationalistic or ethnocentric perspectives on the Yugoslav wars of disintegration and the consequent post-war period. The two and so far most noticeable symbolic focuses of post-Yugoslav cinema are related to the demilitarisation of the warrior and the liberation of women. ‘Ordinary Men’ The term came to discursive prominence through Christopher Browning’s 1992 Holocaust-themed book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, and can be linked to the first philosophical observations of ‘the banality of evil’, whereby ordinary citizens commit heinous crimes, emerging in Hannah Arendt’s reflection on the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In light of this chapter, the ‘ordinary man’ may be seen as both an unwilling perpetrator and the ultimate victim of the political establishment.

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

111

Introduction Unlike in the Yugoslav era(s), post-Yugoslav war-related cinema has a predominantly anti-war stance. In the post-Yugoslav cinematic imagination, a warrior is an ordinary yet unwilling participant, a martyr whose sacrifice is pointless or a savage individual unleashed and used by the forces of nationalism(s). This chapter examines the cinematic conditions and contexts of contemporary postYugoslav war films and takes as its central case study Kristian Milić’s The Living and the Dead (2007), a film which has embedded all the dominant characteristics of the post-Yugoslav war genre. Depicting two parallel battles in central Bosnia, the first fought in 1943 and the second in 1993, although the uniform and badges are slightly different, the soldier’s purpose and role, in both stories, are the same. He is either a man-hunter or the one who is hunted down; violent death is the ultimate fate of both.

A Note on Yugoslav Cinema Yugoslav cinema, as it had been known to cinephiles all over the world, ceased to exist with the violent disappearance of the Yugoslav Federation. Daniel Goulding (2002) established that during the immediate post-WWII years, the cinema of Yugoslavia had followed a political aesthetics, previously mastered in pre-war German and Soviet Union cinematography. Later, some segments of Yugoslav cinema shifted towards the courageous artistic challenging of inflexible Communist dogma. In that regard, one cannot understand the multiplicity of Yugoslav cinema without considering the Yugoslav New Wave movement or ‘Black Wave’ (1963–72), as it was pejoratively labelled by the Communist hardliners who were displeased by this artistic perspective on everyday Yugoslavia. Its cinematography inspired by Italian neo-realism and various new waves in European cinema (Goulding 2002; DeCuir and Baškot 2011), Black Wave filmmaking rejected the then-dominant style of social realism, with its officially supported optimism and patriotic education of the masses, opting, instead, for exposing the darker side of the socialist state with its corruption and hypocrisy (DeCuir and Baškot 2011). The post-Black Wave era of Yugoslav cinema incorporated both discourses: social realism continued, alongside more liberal and provocative cinema. By applying Douglas Kellner’s notion of ‘diagnostic critique’ (Kellner 1995, 2003, 2010), which reads a filmic text in relation to the specific elements of its era, one should be able to comprehend through its cinema the rise, demise and everything inbetween of the Yugoslav state. Yugoslav national cinema, being affected and inspired by the socio-political discourse of its time, is another reference point. Its films and the discursive ‘noise’ they made should help a historian or thoughtful citizen of the world to understand the rise and fall of the country created exclusively for the South Slavs.

112 

D. MURTIC

Self-Portrait of a Victim in Newly Established National Cinemas The 1991–1999 Yugoslav wars of secession brought to the surface new cinematic paradigms across Yugoslav territories. One by one, Serbian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Croatian, Bosnian and other national cinemas have emerged. Croatian film scholar Jurica Pavičić (2011) describes these cinematic tendencies either as the cinemas of ‘self-victimisation’ or ‘self-Balkanisation’. Focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on Croatian national cinema, Pavičić speaks of the war and immediate post-war years as the era of self-victimisation, whereby films created in this discursive paradigm are characterised by a rediscovered nationalism, and a sense of victimhood. In such films, the perspective is always binary: my nation/ethnic group is morally superior, while the other(s) are the opposite of it. In Communist Yugoslavia’s depictions of WWII, the representational status of the brave and morally superior partisan warrior was undisputed. Opposed to the partisan warrior, according to Šešić (2006: 110), the image of the enemy was “pictured in the darkest tone available”. In post-1990s war cinemas of self-victimisation, the enemy is also one-dimensional; however, what differentiates Yugoslav war-related films from cinemas of self-victimisation is the outcome of WWII.  Multinational Yugoslav partisans led by Communists belonged to the winning side; the nationalist forces were not amongst the WWII victors. Therefore, they are victims. Perhaps the most inglorious example of the cinema of self-victimisation is Jakov Sedlar’s Four by Four (1999). The film focuses on the massacre in the Austrian city of Bleiburg at the end of WWII in which members of the Yugoslav Partisan Army executed, without trial, soldiers and civilians belonging to the Nazi puppet state known as Independent Croatia (NDH). By insisting on the pogrom of soldiers and civilians alike, in Sedlar’s imagination, the entire nation of Croats is designated a victim. On the other hand, the Yugoslav partisans are depicted as brutal and without mercy for their victim/nation; they are reduced to pure evil. Miroslav Lekić’s The Knife (1999) is a Serbian equivalent of Four by Four. Based on the 1980s novel of the same title by Serbian writer-turnedpolitician Vuk Drašković, The Knife depicts the life of a Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) named Alija, in search of his ethnic heritage. At one stage, Alija discovers that he is the only survivor of the WWII massacre committed by Bosniaks over their Serbian neighbours, with his survival dependent on his adoption by a Bosniak family, who raised him as their biological child. On discovering his roots, Alija rejects his forced identity and chooses to return to his origins. Serbian discourse during the 1980s insisted on national self-victimisation, highlighting the atrocity of the crimes committed against the Serbs. The WWII crimes committed over Serbs are unpardonable and should not be allowed to happen again. Thus, in the wars of the 1990s, Alija chooses to fight on the Serbian side. The intention of director Lekić and screenwriter Drašković is clear: Alija won’t let his own people be massacred again or, which is framed as somehow even worse, deprived of their ethnic identity. While making a

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

113

comparative analysis of The Knife and Four by Four, Diana Jelača (2016) argues that, in both instances, a specific ethnic and/or national group is the ultimate WWII victim. Therefore, the 1990s Yugoslav wars were fought for the survival of a nation.

‘A Wild Balkan man’ or, We Shall Give to the World What the World Wants to See The second category, according to Pavičić, is the cinema of self-Balkanisation. This time, he writes mainly, but not exclusively, about Serbian national cinema. The narrative in these films is characterised by the confirmation of Western stereotypes about the inhabitants of the Western Balkans. Here, the postYugoslav space is depicted as consistently imagined by the West, where barbarism, embodied through “excessive violence and a masculine point of view”, prevails (Vidan 2011: 187). This violence is presented as almost natural—a Balkan man kills another man in an outburst of emotion or in revenge, or simply because “they do not know otherwise” (Lazarević-Radak 2016: 148). Some of the most noticeable examples of the filmic expression of self-Balkanisa̵ Dragojević’s tion are Milčo Mančevski’s Before the Rain (1994) and Srdan Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996). Perhaps the example best known internationally of the cinema of self-Balkanisation is Emir Kusturica’s Underground; the 1995 Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. Supported by finely crafted visual and poetic aesthetics, Underground offers a view of two parallel Yugoslav worlds, above and underground. As such, its attempt is to serve as an allegorical record of Yugoslav post-WWII history. Those above are the Communist rulers who profited most from the victory over fascism. The less fortunate live underground in accordance with the distorted reality imposed upon them by their rulers. By the time those who live underground reach the surface, the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia are in full swing. For Kusturica, those who appear from below, including rigid nationalist forces, are the metaphorical embodiment of the consequences of the crimes committed by the Communists against their own people. For both Žižek (1997) and Iordanova (2001), Kusturica in 1995 offered the Western European gaze what mainstream Europe wanted to see. For Žižek (1997: 38), Underground is an archetypal “example of ‘Balkanism’ which functions in a similar way to Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’: the Balkans as the timeless space onto which the West projects its phantasmatic content”. Once the carefully crafted visual Balkan aesthetic in Underground is left behind, it becomes also evident that Kusturica co-wrote and visualised the Yugoslav historical narrative from his particular political perspective. In Underground, the Yugoslav Communists, during and after WWII, were represented as ‘scum’, yet ‘scum’ with varying levels of responsibility and moral value. The Serbian Communists, unlike their compatriots from the other ethnic communities in the former Yugoslavia, are somehow likeable. The Serbs are

114 

D. MURTIC

brutal, yet witty. Their transgression is calculated but also caused by passion and naivety. Thus, Underground, on the one hand, is the product of propaganda on behalf of the Serbian nationalist elite. On the other hand, it is a visual spectacle for a Western audience, which is horrified but excited by images that depict the Western Balkans as a “timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions” (Žižek 1997: 38). While cinema styles do not necessarily have clear boundaries, and Underground is indeed a most popular example of the cinema of self-Balkanisation, Kusturica here still embeds segments of a self-victimising discourse that, in this instance, serves a specific nationalist agenda.

Post-Yugoslav Cinema: The Cinema of Normalisation The current dominant phase of the post-Yugoslav cinematic paradigm is ‘normalisation’ (Pavičić 2011), a term describing aesthetic, cultural and political shifts in filmmaking across the socio-cultural spaces of the former Yugoslavia in the twenty-first century. While reproducing the contemporary political perspective across post-Yugoslav territories, Pavičić’s cinematic labelling is inspired by welcomed socio-political changes in the territories which once constituted the Yugoslav state. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the 1990s war leaders were either dead or had faced the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Once the former Yugoslav political space was freed from semi-democratic nationalistic regimes, the states born on the ashes of Yugoslavia started to rebuild their political, economic and cultural contacts. Without underestimating the efforts of other Yugoslav successor states, the reconstruction of cultural connections has become a prominent feature amongst the now-independent states of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro in particular, as those four countries rediscover their connections through “common language, culture, history, tradition and […] populations that overlap across new bor̵ ders” (Andelić 2017: 65). Alongside normalisation, the term ‘post-Yugoslav’ has become yet another category that has entered discourse, which reflects the aftermath of the wars of the 1990s. For Tijana Matijević (2013: 105) Post-Yugoslav is the cultural and political designation, which functions as a tool to counter both the nationalistic agenda of post-Yugoslav societies and neoliberal economies which accompanied the formation of all the respective postYugoslav states.

Post-Yugoslav cinema, as defined by Levi (2007), Pavičić (2011), Dević (2012), Murtic (2015), Jelača (2016), Gilić (2017) and Vidan (2018), is a scholarly attempt to reflect on contemporary post-Yugoslav cinematic expression and set it as a relevant counter-argument against prominent nationalistic and neoliberal tendencies, in not just specific post-Yugoslav but also more general European space(s). Here, the inclusion of post-Yugoslav discourse into the

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

115

European context is necessary; as the past and present of post-Yugoslavia are an “image and an effect of its own [European] history” (Balibar et al. 2002: 74). Thus, the post-Yugoslav and cinema of normalisation are a methodological and heuristic framework through which one may rethink not only post-Yugoslav but also European, political and aesthetic responses to the blinding rage of nationalism, xenophobia and racism, as well as the sharp decline of conditions for the working class.

New Roles for Men and Women The post-Yugoslav cinema of normalisation is above all an integrative space for common cultures, facilitating reflection on war and post-war narratives across common ground. In such a setting, it is possible for a film funded mostly by Croatia, and whose leading actor is from Serbia, to win the most prestigious film award in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Winner of the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) in 2008, Goran Rušinović’s Buick Riviera (2008), exemplifies the cosmopolitan achievements of post-Yugoslav cinema. The film is based on Miljenko Jergović’s 2002 novel of the same name; Jergović is a Sarajevo-born Croat living in the Croatian capital Zagreb; Goran Rušinović, the director of the film, is a young Croatian director resident in the United States. Two equally important roles in Rušinović’s film are given to Slavko Štimac and Leon Lučev. The latter is a talented Croatian actor, who in Buick Riviera plays Vuko—a Bosnian Serb living in Middle America. Slavko Štimac, on the other hand, is a doyen of Serbian film and theatre. Well known in Sarajevo for his role in Kusturica’s debut film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981), in Buick Riviera, Štimac is again given the role of a secular Muslim, as he transforms himself into Hasan—a quiet Bosnian émigré in the United States. Vuko and Hasan, previously unknown to each other, meet for the first time by chance on a snowy road in the middle of America. These two men will spend the next twenty-four hours mentally sabotaging each other. While trying to figure out who is guilty of what, their lives change forever. Yet, they prove nothing, just as the wars of the 1990s did not prove or justify anything; the film’s ending has the characteristics of classical theatrical tragedy. Stylistically and discursively, Buick Riviera is already a step away from the cinematic cliché of the “Yugoslavian wild man” (Jameson 2004: 240). While still exposing the emotional fragility of two men from the former Yugoslavia, deeply traumatised by the recent conflict, Rušinović avoids emphasising the previously preferred ‘ferocity’ of ‘barbaric’ men as seen in the cinema of self-Balkanisation. For their performances in Buick Riviera, Štimac and Lučev shared the best actor award at the SSF. It was poignant to see these two men together on the red carpet, while holding in their hands stylised, golden hearts—the trademark of the SFF. The discourse of normalisation in post-Yugoslav cinema can also be seen in the emergence of female directors. Aida Begić and Jasmila Žbanić are Sarajevobased directors who have effectively used the power of film narrative to depict the aftermath of war from women’s perspectives. The accent in their films on

116 

D. MURTIC

domestic spaces, the rhythms of everyday life and female solidarity construct an alternative to that of patriarchal societies across post-Yugoslavia. Begić, in the film Snow (2008), offers a dreamy, slow-paced story about the women whose entire beings are marked by the horrifying consequences of the not-so-longago military conflict. The film’s setting is a partly demolished Bosniak hamlet in eastern Bosnia. Its central narrative follows a week in the lives of Bosniak refugees who return to their village soon after the war ends. This micro-society is missing a key element for returning to the religiously devotional and patriarchal way of life they had lived before the war: almost the entire male population has perished. When a foreign property developer, escorted by a local Serb, proposes to buy up all their land, the women are tempted to accept the offer and escape poverty and isolation. In the end, the women decide not to sell their village. They are there to stay. The women in the film are portrayed as proud and industrious people. In particular, the main character Alma—played by talented Sarajevan actress Žana Marjanović—is, perhaps, an idealised example of a human being who does not lose her or his dignity despite the almost unbearable psychological and social circumstances. Begić, through Žana’s character, refuses to be a victim. She struggles with the past, but her present is worth living for. Director Begić, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is a practicing Muslim, and her religious commitment is further underlined by the fashionable Islamic scarves that hide her hair and frame her face every time she appears in public. There is no doubt that Begić’s religious affiliation is transferred to the characters in her film. The leading character Alma, in particular, is an example of a woman whose faith in God is very strong despite the doubts and challenges she faces in the struggle of her everyday routine. Alma is also characterised by her strong determination to make decisions about her future. Specifically, in the context of a traditional patriarchal society, it is not the only surviving adult man in the village, but Alma, who takes the decisive role during negotiations with the foreign developer over the future for the surviving villagers. Perhaps, in Snow, Begić successfully shows Islamic feminism whose objective is, according to Balibar (2011: 19), to challenge from the inside the cultural structures of patriarchal domination within this particular form of monotheism. The gender-liberating aspect of Begić’s film is an example showing that the spiritual is not always opposed to the secular. The struggle for dignity and equality for the Other may have several paths. Further optimism, with regard to women’s perspectives, concerns and their visualisations, lies in an important and optimistic detail that Begić and Žbanić are not the only female directors who have made a significant mark in post-Yugoslav cinema. Marina Andrée, Aneta Lešinkovska, Maja Miloš, Andrea Štaka and Teona Strugar, amongst others, are a new generation of talented directors whose artistic practices are challenging the long-established domination of masculinist discourse in the postYugoslav visual space.

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

117

Is It Possible to Disarm a Man from the Balkans? Alongside giving space to women’s voices, an equally important tendency of post-Yugoslav cinema is the demilitarisation of men. However, given the entrenchment of militaristic discourse(s) within post-Yugoslav geographical space, that is clearly a colossal task. According to cultural anthropologist Ivo Žanić (1998), the ‘rebellious warriors’ discourse has existed in the Western Balkans for centuries and was especially strong in rural areas. The violent, yet victorious, liberation of the Slavic national subject from the political and juridical influence of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires accentuated the privileged status of the warrior in the majority of South Slavic cultures. Folk poetry was the most common way of initiating, spreading and preserving this warrior mythology, in folk narratives which insisted on the bravery of mythic proportions displayed by preferred warriors, as well as underlining motifs centred on looting and the enslavement of women. In their struggle for power, the Yugoslav Communists did not need to put a significant amount of energy into the formal enlistment of the masses to their revolutionary and anti-fascist project; during and after WWII, they needed only to reinforce choice elements of these (patriarchal) folk traditions and epic narratives. Some aspects of these folk stories were subjected to transformation and adaptation, with the intention of more closely reflecting Communist ideology—for instance, the Communist versions excluded looting and the enslavement of women. Yet, as Ivo Žanić argues, this transformation was by no means radical. Thus, many aspects of the Communist epic narrative kept a viable link to their original roots in folk and patriarchal traditions. In the early 1980s, the “codex of heroism and radical egalitarianism” were still significant normative elements of the Yugoslav system (Žanic ́ 1998: 63). Cinematically speaking, the figure of the warrior entered the former Yugoslav cinematic screen at the dawn of WWI. He was a Serbian soldier and fought in the Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913), from which the Kingdom of Serbia emerged as the regional superpower. Serbian soldiers recorded on filmstrips during the two Balkan Wars were not professional actors, but rather the unspecified men involved in armed struggles. The battles in which they participated were the first armed conflicts on European soil in the epoch of cinematography, and European filmmakers had rushed to the battlefields with a desire to visualise war. Such visualisation further cemented the dominant position of the Serbian elite during the existence of the first common state for the Southern Slavs—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes—created from the rubble of WWI. These early filmic visualisations of Serbian soldiers had entrenched the myth of the fearless yet morally superior warrior in a Yugoslav, mostly Serbian, context. On the other hand, this also marked the beginning of a (Western) European fetish, which Jameson (2004: 240) ironically baptises the “Yugoslavian wild man”.

118 

D. MURTIC

Yugoslav cinema contributed in spreading and preserving the image of the mythic warrior. In a post-WWII political system based on ‘people’s self-rule’, as the Yugoslav Communist party liked to define their one-party system, film was conceived as “the richest resource among all the artistic media for reaching and informing all levels of society” (Goulding 2002: 8). As the National War of Liberation waged by Communist-commanded partisans during WWII was the central founding myth upon which the post-WWII Yugoslav Federation was built, war films were overwhelmed by action scenes, portraying the devotion and bravery of partisan guerrillas (Šešić 2006: 109–110). In the forty-five years of Communist rule, several generations had grown up with such imagery, with school children deliberately taken to cinema halls to watch war movies; for those who missed such films on the theatrical screen, there was always one of the innumerable replays on television. An intergenerational anthropological study led by Natalija Bašić (cited in Jakiša 2012: 111) found that the prevalence of the partisan visual imaginary during Communist rule reached the point where the ‘historical memory’ of Yugoslav citizens was shaped not by textbooks but rather by Yugoslav war cinema. Yugoslav war cinema did its part in preparing Yugoslav men for the 1990s wars, indeed. Still, very few are, if ever, ready for real war. The chain of armed conflicts at the end of the twentieth century in the territories once called Yugoslavia were indeed a horrifying experience for many—especially women, children and the elderly. While the policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ included forcible removal of the entire population of the ‘wrong’ ethnicity, and the systematic use of rape as a tool of war, physical extermination was by and large practised on men. Armed men destroyed each other on the battlefields from Croatia to Kosovo very often, and very successfully. Furthermore, since unarmed men were easier prey, the militias and regular armed forces slaughtered them mercilessly. Once the 1990s wars of Yugoslav secession ended, post-Yugoslav cinematic space(s) resumed their focus on combatant life and activities in a war zone once again. Unlike the partisan features which—while insisting on total victory over fascism and the mythic bravery of the guerrillas led by the Communists—had overwhelmingly ignored the horrifying aspects of military conflict, even for the victorious side, the vast majority of newer films on the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia have had an anti-war stance. The reasons for this stylistically and politically motivated approach may vary, from artistic sensitivity and the overall democratisation of the post-Yugoslav space(s), to international producers’ insistence on a more balanced point of view on the conflicts (Iordanova 2001). Some notable post-Yugoslav war-themed movies are How the War Started on My Island (1996) by Martin Brešan, No Man’s Land (2001) by Danis Tanović, Nafaka (2006) by Jasmin Duraković, The Blacks (2009) by Horan Dević and Zvonimir Jurić, Ordinary People (2009) by Vladimir Perisić 2009, Men Don’t Cry (2017) by Alen Drljević, and The Load (2018) by Ognjen Glavonić.

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

119

‘Ordinary Men’ in the 1990s Yugoslav Wars With only a few exceptions, a soldier in the post-Yugoslav cinematic imagination is framed as an ordinary yet unwilling participant, a martyr whose sacrifice is pointless, or a savage individual unleashed and used by the forces of nationalism(s). As such, the 1990s warrior’s ordinary appearance, either as a victim or as a perpetrator, is discursively similar to Ingrid Lewis’ (2017) comprehensive elaboration on the ordinary subject in European films about the Holocaust. While emphasising the discursive shift from monstrous figures to ordinary perpetrators that characterises the portrayal of women in twenty-firstcentury Holocaust cinema, Lewis reapplies, this time in a cinematic context, Christopher Browning’s (1992) argument that most perpetrators were ‘ordinary’ people whose crimes were not motivated by racial hatred, but by minor reasons such as peer pressure, career ambitions and obedience to authority. In post-Yugoslav film, the concept of the ordinary perpetrator is the central focus of Serbian director Vladimir Perišić’s feature debut Ordinary People (2009). The film depicts a day in the life of a soldier; Johnny (Relja Popović) who looks like an average, well-behaved boy from the neighbourhood. Johnny is a new recruit and his days are typical of a military barrack routine. This routine is suddenly interrupted by the officer who orders Johnny and other soldiers from the ‘third unit’ to get themselves ready for a combat mission. Seven men, including Johnny, are asked to board the bus. The soldiers have no idea where or why they are going. Johnny’s anxiety begins to build. During the trip, a radio transmits news bulletins about ‘a state of emergency’ and a ‘terrorist attack’. They soon arrive at a collection of abandoned buildings in the countryside. Soldiers escape the heat of a hot summer day by sitting under trees, splashing themselves with water, smoking and wondering what they are waiting for. Very soon their conjecture comes to an end. Johnny and others are ordered to execute civilian men with a rifle shot to the back. By the end of the day, Johnny will have transformed himself from a subject, with feelings of social responsibility and the will for resistance, into an object; by evening, Johnny is nothing more than a lethal weapon in service of military drills and political rhetoric. In Ordinary People, dialogue is at a bare minimum. The camera is static almost all the time, and the shots are very long, almost endless. The space between the camera and the filmed bodies is always kept at the same distance. Any activity—whether it is brushing teeth in the barracks bathroom, eating breakfast in the canteen, smoking a cigarette under a tree, or executing civilians—is filmed from an identical angle and distance. The director’s aim in using this technique is clear. Mass killing has nothing to do with emotions or human nature. It is the particular policy that creates the particular social environment in which the particular crime against humanity can take place. There is a formal and patterned distance. In the film’s very last scene, Johnny takes pleasure in an evening coffee and cigarette. He is on his own. The night is quiet; Johnny too. He looks exactly the same as he looked that morning. He is an ordinary, beardless, young man from a neighbourhood. It is in this ‘everydayness’ that

120 

D. MURTIC

the tragedy lies. In Johnny, we see what Hannah Arendt names the “banality of evil”—the comprehension that the perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity are not psychopaths or sociopaths but so-called ordinary people (Arendt 1963). By treating Johnny as something other than human, to paraphrase Drakulić (2005), we would put him in a different class of human, of which we could never be part. As a result, we refuse to believe that such acts could be committed by our neighbours or by ourselves, thus allowing such things to happen again.

Case Study: The Living and the Dead (Kristijan Milić, 2007) A feature debut, The Living and the Dead (2007), directed by Croatian director Kristijan Milić, presents the concept of ‘recurrence’ as an inevitable and repeated horror in the lives of ordinary men. Based on the acclaimed novel written by Josip Mlakić, a Croat living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Living and the Dead offers a parallel perspective on two wars. One focuses on WWII, and the other is reflecting on the conflict that occurred in the 1990s. In both instances, the place of action is identical, a mountainous and largely uninhabited region of central Bosnia. The 1990s narrative centres its attention on Tomo. He is a member of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), a military formation constituted largely by Croats from Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early stage of the 1990s war in Bosnia, the HVO fought alongside the ARBiH (Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina) against the VRS (the Army of Bosnian Serbs), with the ARBiH being mostly constituted of Bosniaks, while the VRS was a military formation created exclusively by and for the Serbs from Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the initial stage of conflict, HVO fought alongside ARBiH against VRS. Later on, HVO and ARBiH clashed with each other. In the film, Tomo and his HVO comrades are caught in the early stage of this trilateral military conflict. The year is 1993 and, in Bosnia, everybody fights everyone. The parallel WWII narrative focuses on Martin, a member of the Domobrani (Croatian Home Guard). Constituted of Croats and Bosniaks, the Domobrani were part of the armed forces of Independent State of Croatia. This Nazi puppet state was formed soon after Germany occupied the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941. In the film, Martin’s superior is an Ustaša officer. The Ustaša militia was a formidable branch of the Independent State of Croatia’s military, infamously known for horrendous war crimes against Serbs, Jews, Romani and the anti-fascist segments of Croatian and Bosnian populations. Beside Ustaša, Domobrani and the Partisans, the armies which fought during WWII on Bosnian territories included the occupying forces of Germany and Italy, as well as the Serbian paramilitary formations named Č etniks. Although initially formed to fight the occupiers, Č etniks were mostly engaged in the organised killing of Bosniaks, Croats and anti-fascist segments of Serbian population. In

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

121

the part of the film that follows the characters in WWII, Martin and his comrades are facing multiethnic partisan guerrillas. The year is 1943 and, in Bosnia, the partisans fight with all others. Fifty years later, in 1993, the partisans are not amongst the warring sides; at least, they are not amongst those who are alive. Yet, the referential imaginary of partisans, and the remnants of Communist legacy, are marked quite early in Milić’s feature. In The Living and the Dead’s opening scene, Tomo’s HVO comrades, Ćoro and Mali, practise shooting in front of the command post. Their target is a sculptured bust, depicting an unidentifiable man. Those who had the chance to visit Bosnian provincial schools and other community buildings during the Communist era would easily have noticed those same sculptures placed in halls and corridors. It may be assumed, therefore, that the bust is an ideological (albeit artistic) dedication to a local partisan WWII hero, who most likely died in an armed struggle against Nazis or their local collaborators. To honour their sacrifices, and also to highlight their victorious status and impose ideological dominance, the Communist rulers named buildings and places of cultural or educational significance after those fallen soldiers, whose naming would be further underlined by an artefact such as a plaque or bust. Those sites would be commemorated on specific days by laying flowers and holding commemorations. But, as this image clearly indicates, the legacy of honourable and sacrificial dying in Bosnia is provisional and constrained by time; when the Bosnian Communists lost political power in the 1990 election, as The Living and the Dead shows, they also lost the power to protect the symbolic dignity of their fallen soldiers. Even before open conflict began in Croatia and Bosnia, the spirits of defeated armies in WWII had started to surface. Once Viali, Tomo’s other comrade, passes by Ćoro and Mali and enters the HVO command post, he notices a black and white framed photo of an unnamed Ustaša. “It’s a grandpa”, says the HVO commander. His gentle smile signifies pride. It is important to pause here and make the point that The Living and the Dead does not intend to foreground the idea of retaliation against the partisans. On the contrary, the shot partisan bust and framed Ustaša picture signify the awakening of ghosts from the past. In Bosnia, ghosts’ habitats are the mountains; a nearby mountain is the next destination for Tomo and his five HVO comrades. Fifty years earlier, in 1943, Tomo’s grandfather Martin had headed towards the same mountain. When shifting between the two parallel narratives, director Milić avoids abrupt cuts. Instead, specific scene-setting and camera movement in scenes from the WWII conflict are identical to those depicting the conflict in 1993. It is the director’s clear intention to emphasise the unity as well as the repetitiveness of these two parallel narratives (Šošić 2009). This narrative process suggests reappearance: war happened, war is happening right now, and may happen again. The uniforms and insignia might be different, but men and their tragic role in the wars are the same. However, the film still insists on aesthetic distinctions between the two narratives. Unlike the daytime scenes from the 1993 narrative, those from 1943 are painted in the colours of the past, in which sepia

122 

D. MURTIC

prevails. In addition, many sequences from the 1943 narrative are supplemented by special effects; this, along with an emphasis on setting and dialogue in the 1943 sequences, produces a theatrical effect. According to the director Milić (cited in Šošić 2009), the 1990s wars remain current wars; either lived on the battlefield or seen on the television. WWII, however, due to its historical distance, is distorted by myth. Mythical or not, a violent death is the common fate for almost all protagonists in the film. And most of these killings are unglorified and, in some instances, grotesque. The HVO commander, Ivo, is accidentally killed by a fellow soldier while emptying his bowels in the shrub. His unlikely assassin, Robe, dies by erratically running into the minefield set up by his fellow solider, Viali. In the WWII narrative, Ferid, Martin’s best friend, is shot in the back. His dying scream symbolises nothing but fear; the trepidation of a human being unwilling to leave the world of the living. The only stylised death is the cruel execution of a captured partisan in the WWII narrative. In one of the most distinctive scenes in the whole movie, the remaining Domobrani and Ustaša soldiers are standing on a hillock, making a semicircle around the captured partisan. The scene depicts the partisan as unafraid. He is calm and looks his captors in the eyes, yet without pride or anger. A moment before, the Ustaša major has given Tomo an order to shoot the unarmed man. While Tomo is unwillingly getting ready to pull the trigger, another Ustaša pulls his pistol out and shoots the partisan in the forehead. Blood pours out as a fountain through the exit wound in the captured man’s head. This segment is filmed in slow motion. The partisan’s body falls on the ground. “Don’t you wonder why I did it?”, asks the Ustaša who has just killed the unarmed man. “Why?” asks Tomo, still in shock. “Because nobody replaced me when it was needed”. This dialogue between Tomo and his comrade exemplifies the petty banality of men being dehumanised under military conditions. The comrades may try to protect each other from committing the crime, yet the ultimate sacrifice is banal. The victim is not spared, and the unwilling war criminal must continue to fight. With this image, amongst all the killing in the film, Milić strategically gives aesthetic emphasis to the only murder that can be characterised as a war crime. The scene’s aesthetic appeal urges its viewers to remember this passage and carry it with themselves for a long period of time. If not earlier, this scene (placed in the middle of the film) is where the film finally discloses its ultimately anti-war stance. From this moment, the dead prevail over the living. Domobrani and Ustaša groups from the 1943 narrative will be killed one by one in stubborn and never-ending partisan attacks. Martin is the only one who survives. Alone, he reaches a small cemetery at the edge of forest. In a more-than-symbolic mixture of pagan, Catholic and Muslim tombstones, he sees the executed partisan and his assassin motionlessly standing next to each other. An almost identical destiny awaits Tomo and his HVO comrades from the 1990s story; they too will die one by one, until Tomo is seriously wounded and Viali is ready to commit suicide. Both men are in the graveyard encountered by Martin fifty years

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

123

ago, dead soldiers from all wars standing above them. In the middle, there is a campfire that makes their bodies and faces recognisable. Tomo lacks the courage to look at them. The blood begins to pour through his mouth. Viali calls his name. Tomo does not respond. Viali leans the pistol against his own head. The movie ends. In The Living and the Dead, dying is not the worst thing that could happen to a soldier. To kill and be killed is futile; even to survive is no guarantee of a definite escape from the recurring apocalypse named war. Martin, the grandfather, lived, but Tomo, the grandchild, may not. Somehow, with The Living and the Dead, post-Yugoslav cinema has begun to shift its discursive stance from ‘hero warrior’ versus ‘perpetrator who is pure evil’ to ‘all men in war are at a loss’. In Milić’s visualisation of Mlakić’s novel, a man in war is not just an ordinary person. He is an insignificant bodily appearance destined to perish in the cyclic eruption of violence regardless of the insignia he is wearing. The political or ideological causes, which trigger the conflict, are pointless to him. His sacrifice might be seen as a heroic act in one specific political time frame, only to be ridiculed in the other. There is a blurred line from keeping the bust of a war hero in a school hall, to having the same bust shot by the ordinary recruits who are counting their days amongst the living.

Conclusion Semezdin Mehmedinović begins his poem named War—written in a besieged Sarajevo in 1992—with the following verses: “It’s the war, and nothing is happening”. The verses were written in a time when even outsiders had begun to learn about the ravaging consequences of Bosnian conflict. According to Kazaz (2004), Mehmedinović intentionally reconstructs George Orwell’s identical line from his diaries about the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s ‘nothing happens’ was written by an enthusiastic soldier who had no satisfaction in an unsettled peace between two battles. Orwell couldn’t wait to become victorious over fascism, the evil of his time. Mehmedinović, however, had lost hope. The evil is always returning. Mehmedinović’s anti-war stance insists that war is an ordinary, senseless event. Post-Yugoslav cinema has begun to depict the evil which emerged in the war as an ordinary subject. Even a filmic warrior, who is fighting this evil, is an ordinary man. For the earnest as well as for the evil, for the living and for the deceased, war is a cyclical event with no sense at all. Everyone is at a loss. Yet, there is hope. Since the making of The Living and the Dead, postYugoslav cinema has continued to make anti-war statements, embodied in narratives such as Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load (2018). In the film, set in the Serbia of 1999 during NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) airstrike campaign against the Slobodan Milosevic regime, truck driver Vlada—the son of a WWII partisan war hero—is ordered to collect a mysterious load from wartorn Kosovo and transport it to the Serbian capital Belgrade. While not explicitly shown, the film audience is aware that the refrigerated truck is jam-packed

124 

D. MURTIC

with the corpses of Kosovars killed by Serbian army and militia. The sense of moral decadence is obvious: while Vlada’s father bravely fought fascists in WWII, his son has become the unwilling servant of evil. Nowadays, “[n]o one, not even pacifists”, writes Sontag (2003: 5), “believes that war can be abolished…We hope only”, continues Sontag, “to stop genocide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violation of the laws of war…and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives” (Sontag 2003: 5). For now, there is only the hope that the symbolic texture of the post-Yugoslav anti-war cinematic discourse may influence a young man to reject a call to arms in a conflict to come. That should be enough in slowing the march of inevitable evil. In the meantime, evil may lose its way.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. After reading this chapter and/or watching some of the mentioned films, would you agree with Kellner’s claim that every film coming from a national cinema represents its socio-political climate? 2. Why are ‘war’- and ‘warrior’-themed films made during the Yugoslav era different from post-Yugoslav film narratives? Consider comparing, for example, Veljko Bulajic’s film The Battle of Sutjeska (1973) with Kristijan Milić’s The Living and the Dead (2007). 3. Is the post-Yugoslav cinema depiction of the warrior different to that of other European filmmaking, Hollywood war films or the representation of military conflict in a national cinema of your choice? 4. For many (not only cinema scholars), artistic cooperation between newly formed post-Yugoslav states is an important step forward in establishing peace permanently in the Balkans. Why, and in what ways, is post-Yugoslav film art contributing to the peace-making process?

References ̵ Andeelić , Neven. 2017. Post-Yugoslav Cinema and Politics: Films, Lies and Video Tape. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention 6 (2): 65–80. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: The Viking Press. Balibar, Étienne. 2011. Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations. Grey Room 44: 6–25. Balibar, Etienne, Erin M.  Williams, and Emily Apter. 2002. World Borders, Political Borders. PMLA 117 (1): 68–78. Browning, Christopher R. 1992. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins World. DeCuir, Greg, and Gordana Baškot. 2011. Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72  in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Belgrade: Film Centre Serbia. Dević, Ana. 2012. Fringe Antinationalisms: Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Cinema. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG.

7  AN ORDINARY WARRIOR AND HIS INEVITABLE DEFEAT: REPRESENTATION… 

125

Drakulić, Slavenka. 2005. They Would Never Hurt A Fly: War Criminals On Trial in The Hague. New York: Penguin. Gilić, Nikica. 2017. Post-Yugoslav Film and the Construction of New National Cinemas. Contemporary Southeastern Europe 4 (2): 102–120. Goulding, Daniel. 2002. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience 1945–2001. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Iordanova, Dina. 2001. Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media. London: British Film Institute. Jakiša, Miranda. 2012. Memory of a Past to Come – Yugoslavia’s Partisan Film and the Fashioning of Space and Time. In Balkan Memories. Media Constructions of National and Transnational History, ed. Tanja Zimmermann, 111–120. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Jameson, Fredric. 2004. Thoughts on Balkan Cinema. In Subtitles: On The Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, 231–258. Boston: MIT Press. Jelača, Dijana. 2016. Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. New York: Palgrave. Kazaz, Enver. 2004. Prizori Uhodanog Užasa. Sveske 5 (2): 137–165. Kellner, Douglas. 1995. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-modern. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. Media Spectacle. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Lazarević-Radak, Sanja. 2016. Film i politički kontekst: o jugoslovenskom i srpskom Filmu. Pančevo: Mali Nemo. Levi, Pavle. 2007. Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lewis, Ingrid. 2017. Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Matijević, Tijana. 2013. National, Post-national, Transnational. Is Post-Yugoslav Literature an Arguable or Promising Field of Study? In Grenzräume– Grenzbewegungen: Ergebnisse der Arbeitstreffen des Jungen Forums Slavistische Literaturwissenschaft in Basel, 101–112. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam 2016. Murtic, Dino. 2015. Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Towards a Cosmopolitan Imagining. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavičić, Jurica. 2011. Postjugoslavenski film. Stil i ideologija. Zagreb: Hrvatsko filmski savez. Šešić, Rada. 2006. Walter Defends Sarajevo. In The Cinema of the Balkans, ed. Dina Iordanova, 107–116. London: Wallflower Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Šošić, Anja. 2009. Film i rat u Hrvatskoj. Refleksije jugoslavenskih ratova u hrvatskom igranom filmu 64: 64–65. Vidan, Aida. 2011. Spaces of Ideology in South Slavic Films. Studies in Eastern European Cinema 2 (2): 173–192. ———. 2018. Perceptions of Authority and Freedom in Late Yugoslav and Post-­ Yugoslav Film. Studies in Eastern European Cinema 9 (1): 33–46. Žanić, Ivo. 1998. Prevarena povijest: guslarska estrada, kult hajduka i rat u Hrvatskoj i Bosni i Hercegovini, 1990–1995. godine. Zagreb: Durieux. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism. New Left Review 225 (September–October): 28–51.

PART II

Directions

CHAPTER 8

The New/Old Patriarchal Auteurism: Manoel de Oliveira, the Male Gaze and Women’s Representation Ingrid Lewis and Irena Sever Globan

Definitions Auteur According to Etherington-Wright and Doughty (2011), an auteur can be defined as a filmmaker, usually a director, who has artistic control over the filmmaking process, whose films express a personal vision and can be analysed in terms of recurrent themes and aesthetics. Debates on the concept of the auteur emerged in the 1940s in France through the writings of Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. Male Gaze A concept formulated in the 1970s by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey. In her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1973), Mulvey argues that classical film is predicated on a narrow gender stereotyping

I. Lewis (*) Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] I. Sever Globan Catholic University of Croatia, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_8

129

130 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

that assigns men an active role in the narrative, while designating women as passive objects of the male gaze. Scopophilia Borrowing from the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, the concept of scopophilia, or sexual pleasure derived from watching an objectified other, has been applied to film by Laura Mulvey. She considers scopophilia as central to mainstream film viewing and argues that cinema activates unconscious processes based on the primeval fascination with looking. Voyeurism Mulvey further argues that the darkness of the screening room confers upon spectators a privileged voyeuristic position, which allows them to peep into a private world. Through identification with male characters, the men in the audience derive pleasure by looking at cinematic women displayed as passive and sexualised objects of the male gaze. Thus, voyeurism takes place when the passive female character is secretly desired, objectified and controlled by the male character and, by extension, by the male audience.

Introduction Films, and media in general, play a significant role in shaping the value system within a culture, defining the canons of femininity, morality and beauty. According to Liesbet Van Zoonen (2004), media has nowadays become a central arena in which the discursive negotiation of gender takes place. In the same vein, Sofia Sjö (2007: 63) argues that media representation of women is a barometer for the role assigned to women in any specific society and culture. Since media discourses on gender and sex can shape, challenge or reinforce our beliefs, it is crucially important to examine how women are or, on the contrary, are not, represented by media. The twenty-first century has witnessed numerous international cinematic productions that cast strong women in leading roles. Similarly, in European cinema, Ingrid Lewis (2017) acknowledges the emergence of a series of films about the Holocaust that bring to the forefront women’s experiences. As she argues, the women portrayed in these films are protagonists of their own story; they have a voice of their own and are not defined by their relationship to their male counterparts, but stand alone as accomplished characters who narrate their achievements, struggles, feelings and lives. Furthermore, Barbara Mennel (2019: 6) argues that, due to feminist demands over the decades, twenty-first-­ century European cinema has witnessed an increasing number of cinematic narratives that focus on working women while interrogating female empowerment and the impact of neoliberal capitalism. Dissenting from contemporary representations, Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira intentionally chooses to adopt a rigid and archetypal image

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

131

of women, who are portrayed from a male perspective and framed as the source of men’s troubles and restlessness. His films conform to the impetus to fulfil the demands of the conventional male gaze that characterises traditional cinema. According to Laura Mulvey (1985: 310), “the man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power (…) as the bearer of the look of the spectator”. In the same vein, John Berger (1972: 47) states: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” As explained later in the chapter, the three Oliveira films discussed in this chapter reflect much of this patriarchal metanarrative and comply with the dynamics of classical cinema designating the woman as site and object of gaze. Oliveira’s case is particularly interesting since, from a formal and narrative point of view, he is clearly a twentieth-century auteur fitting the canon of the ‘great, white, male’ auteurs (Andrews 2013: 44) that populated European Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, cinema has greatly changed over the decades and, if the notion of auteurship has survived, it has done so by accommodating new trends and directions in film theory. Notwithstanding this change, Oliveira’s longevity and prolific career allowed him to carry into the twenty-first century a set of female representations which can be considered highly problematic in the context of contemporary society. This chapter firstly discusses the figure of Manoel de Oliveira, whose filmmaking career spanned from 1931 to 2015, making him the longest active filmmaker in the history of cinema. Secondly, it argues that Oliveira presents an antiquated portrayal of women by focusing on three of his most recent films, namely Belle Toujours (2006), Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009) and The Strange Case of Angelica (2010). In doing so, the chapter clearly shows that his films display regressive gender representations and interrogates whether his auteur status facilitated such a problematic depiction of women. Moreover, this chapter implies that, despite its perceived position in contradiction to classical Hollywood and mainstream films, auteur cinema often reiterates similar gendered paradigms by simply ‘smuggling’ its representational politics in different aesthetic and stylistic approaches.

Patriarchy, Auteur Cinema and Beyond Before discussing Oliveira, it is important to define auteur cinema, explaining how it is positioned in relation to classical Hollywood and mainstream cinema. According to Etherington-Wright and Doughty (2011), an auteur can be defined as a filmmaker, usually a director, who has artistic control over the filmmaking process, whose films express a personal vision and can be analysed in terms of recurrent themes and aesthetics. The debates related to auteur theory emerged in the 1940s in France through the writings of Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin, and continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, catalysed by a group of enthusiast young critics and filmmakers, which were grouped around the newly founded magazine Cahiers du cinéma (in English meaning “Cinema Notebook”). These young auteurs, among whom number François Truffaut,

132 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Claude Chabrol, are recognised as belonging to the French New Wave, one of the most influential movements in film history (Etherington-Wright and Doughty 2011: 1–2; Hayward 2000: 19–21). The paradox of the movement lies in the fact that, despite being developed “to raise the cultural status of cinema and to validate the superiority of European cinema over that of the USA” (Wood 2007: 27), the French New Wave has constantly sought inspiration from the film industry on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, its young French filmmakers looked up to great Hollywood directors, namely Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger and Howard Hawks, declaring them auteurs for their personal style, seemingly uncompromised by the studio constraints in which they were working (Bordwell and Thompson 2013: 486). It is important to note that the New Wave style, characterised by improvisation, handheld camera, natural light, loose plots and ambiguous endings (Bordwell and Thompson 2013: 487), could not be more different from the aesthetic conventions and strict narrative principles that governed the broadly standardised Hollywood cinema of the time. However, from a gendered perspective, French New Wave films replicate the patriarchal dynamics and troublesome representations of women that dominate classical practices on the other side of the ocean. Arguably, the fascination of early European auteurs with Hollywood films served only to indiscriminately reinforce the patriarchal ideologies of an already male-dominated domain. Geneviève Sellier (2008: 6) highlights the absence of women among the 150 young directors who made their first film in France between 1957 and 1962, the peak years of the French New Wave movement. Moreover, as she (ibid.) claims, these filmmakers aspired for a greater “personal liberty” and, as a consequence, started to write in first person, using the pronoun “I” as an articulation of their subjectivity “in a new attempt to take account of lived experience at its most intimate, its most quotidian, and its most contemporary”. Sellier (2008: 6–8) further explains how the “first person masculine singular” of the French New Wave fostered a dominant male canon, which is revealing for the “subtle dialectic between the mechanisms of masculine and patriarchal domination” and the slow recognition of the perspective of women, usually seen as an Other. In this context, Agnès Varda is in fact the exception that confirms the rule: despite her impressive career during the French New Wave “she is rarely accorded the visibility of her male colleagues” (Cook 2007: 472). In a similar vein, Mary Wood (2007: 35) states that auteur cinema has been for long “the purview of educated and articulate males”, a reality challenged only in recent years when the benefits of the digital era afforded Varda a greater visibility. As Catherine Fowler (2002: 90) ironically claims “in order to be an auteur one must be male and must make a particular type of cinema”. Arguably, despite their considerable differences in style, form and narrative, European auteurism and classical Hollywood cinema share to a great degree a male-centred perspective and an objectification of women that has been at the heart of feminist debates since the 1970s. The same can be applied to mainstream cinema, which, having evolved from classical Hollywood films and

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

133

belonging mostly to a studio context, carries the same discursive weaknesses in relation to patriarchal representations of women. For this reason, this chapter makes references to the three types of cinema in a rather interchangeable way; however, this should be understood solely from the perspective of their gendered representations.

Two Centuries, One Filmmaker: Problematising Oliveira as an Auteur Manoel de Oliveira’s unique figure in the history of cinema has been acknowledged by various scholars. Randal Johnson (2007: 2) commends “Oliveira’s cinematic longevity” and the “creative vitality of his films”; Carolin Overhoff Ferreira (2008: 2) emphasises his “unquestionable importance within film history”, while Mariana Liz (2018: 10) identifies Oliveira as “the most international and the most important filmmaker in Portuguese cinema”. His prolific career spanned over eight decades, making Oliveira the only director in the world who started filming in the silent period and managed to survive into the digital era. As Oliveira stated in an interview: “I grew up with cinema and he grew up with me; we walked together. The evolution of film criticism has been considerable, and my mental evolution also has been great” (Johnson 2007: 147). Between his first silent documentary Labour on the Douro River (1931) and his last posthumously released short, A Century of Energy (2015), Oliveira’s career lasted eighty-four years and resulted in sixty-five titles. Maintaining a high degree of artistic control over the final product, Oliveira often wrote and edited his films, and even produced some of them. As Johnson (2007: 2) claims, the Portuguese filmmaker was able to pursue his own vision and original style because he was “unrestrained by the structures of studio production and commercial imperatives”. While, for the first half of his career, Oliveira’s filming was less productive and suffered under the censorship imposed by the dictatorial regime of the Portuguese Second Republic (Johnson 2007: 3; Mira 2005: 2–5), from the 1990s until his death in 2015, Oliveira was extremely prolific, directing between one and three films each year, with the exception of 2011 and 2013. He was repeatedly honoured at European film festivals throughout his career, and frequently compared with seminal European auteurs such as Dreyer, Bresson, Bergman and Rossellini (Johnsons 2007: 2). Importantly, Oliveira considers himself as a truly European filmmaker, claiming in an interview, “I reject traditional cinema, the American-style film that wants to give us the impression that life is on the screen, not outside of it” (Johnson 2007: 149). Oliveira criticises what he considers the politics of emotion that prevail in Hollywood films, opting instead for “a different kind of cinema” that is “more European”, because it requires active participation on behalf of the audience and engages the spectator in a deeply reflexive process (ibid.). As Johnson (2003, 2007: 4) points out, Oliveira’s films “raise many

134 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

questions, but they rarely provide answers”, challenging the audience “to think about, rather than passively accept, that which is shown on the screen”. Inviting reflection, his cinema is tailored for an active audience, engaged in a complex process of interpreting his films. Moreover, one has to consider that Oliveira’s early career took place during a significant period for European cinema, when two of the most important film movements—Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave—emerged. During this time, filmmaking became a highly innovative and dynamic arena, in which directors positioned their films in dialogue and greatly influenced each other. Despite the restrictions imposed by Portugal’s dictatorship, Oliveira was influenced by the auteurist climate and was deeply aware of these new stylistic trends and changes in European cinema. De Baecque and Parsi’s (1996) interview collection with Oliveira mentions his encounters with André Bazin, prominent figure of the French New Wave and co-founder of the magazine Cahiers du cinema. Renowned auteurs also resurface in Oliveira’s interviews, such as François Truffaut, Roberto Rossellini, Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel and Robert Bresson, among others. Furthermore, the Portuguese filmmaker claims that his first feature film Aniki Bóbó (1942) predates Italian Neorealism, sharing many of its features such as the natural settings, non-professional actors and children in protagonist roles (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 126). Overall, Oliveira’s work is undoubtedly located in European auteurist cinema, bearing the imprint of its early stages and in a constant dialogue with other ‘great’, ‘male’ auteurs dominating European cinema in the decades of post-World War II. According to João Bénard da Costa (2008), Oliveira’s filmography exhibits a deep unity, with a discernible consistency in terms of cinematic style and a recurrence of key thematic concerns. As Da Costa (2008: 11) acknowledges, “although much has changed (…), even more has remained the same”. The core themes that prevail through most of his eight decades of cinema are life and death, ageing, memory, good versus evil, desire, unfulfilled love, nationhood and religion (Johnson 2003, 2005, 2007, 2018; Overhoff Ferreira 2008). Overall, as Overhoff Ferreira (2018: 76) emphasises, Oliveira’s films are characterised by an abundance of philosophical, cultural and existential themes and are dominated by a strong preoccupation with the ‘human condition’. Stylistically, they are characterised by the use of static camera, long takes, theatricality, emphasis on dialogues, economy of characters, meticulous frame composition and slowness (Johnson 2003, 2005, 2007; Overhoff Ferreira 2018). Recently, scholars, such as Cruchinho (2008) and Da Costa (2008), have highlighted Oliveira’s problematic portrayal of women, depicted as objects of erotic fruition, mysterious beings and sources of evil and guilt. Referring to various films made between 1988 and 2000, Cruchinho (2008: 58) argues that Oliveira has “carved the woman” in a highly “stereotyped manner as an invention of man; not a different gender, but the bodily object that men desire”. The three films discussed later in the chapter illustrate that such tendencies to stereotype and objectify women are encountered also in more recent films

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

135

directed by Manoel de Oliveira. Arguably, in relation to the portrayal of women, Oliveira’s films set in place an intricate process of reviving a regressive patriarchal auteurism which is performed, as explained later, through mechanisms of male identification, male gaze, male voiceover and a strong voyeuristic element.

The Revival of the Male Gaze in Oliveira’s Recent Films Belle Toujours (2006), Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009) and The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) reiterate a representational pattern of women present in classical Hollywood cinema, which assigns women a passive role as objects of the male gaze. According to Laura Mulvey (1985: 309), in the representational practices of classical cinema, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female”. Therefore, while men are assigned an active position as bearers of the look, women are relegated to passive roles, as objects of voyeuristic display. As explained earlier, although from a stylistic perspective European auteurism is deliberately positioned in dichotomy with classical Hollywood and mainstream cinema, all three share a male canon and perspective that points to their highly regressive stance in relation to gendered representations. Siân Reynolds (2006: 368) states that although Mulvey’s male gaze theory has been applied mostly to Hollywood cinema, it is encountered “in a great deal of European cinema too”, and feminist theorist Pam Cook (1990: 31) argues that in auteur cinema “images of women are understood as expressions of male desires or anxieties”. Moreover, Oliveira’s three films explicitly depict women through the virgin/whore dichotomy, a stereotyped perspective wherein female characters are either framed as “good girls” who abstain from sex (“the virgin”) or “bad girls” who are sexually promiscuous (“the whore”, “the femme fatale”) (Benshoff 2015: 150). As Ruth Holliday (2008: 196) argues, “women in the past have frequently been restricted to a limited range of roles and were most highly valued for their looks. (…) In addition, representations of women seemed to be divided into two kinds—good women and bad women.” Importantly, Benshoff (2015: 150) warns against the pitfalls of such narrow stereotyping which “tends to reduce a woman’s subjectivity onto a singular aspect of her being—her sexuality”. The employment of such outdated paradigms in films that have been released in the twenty-first century is incongruous and calls for a close examination of Oliveira’s vision of women and femininity. In Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), Oliveira depicts the story of a Macário, a young accountant whose life is turned upside down after falling in love with a beautiful but deceptive blonde girl named Luísa (Catarina Wallenstein). The narrative is told through a long flashback as Macário (Ricardo Trêpa) recounts his peculiar love story to an unknown middle-aged woman sitting beside him on a train from Lisbon to Algarve. The trope of retelling to a complete stranger some key life events witnessed by the male protagonist is also encountered in the film Belle Toujours (2006). Interestingly, the opening

136 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

scene of Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl reveals that all double seats in the train are occupied by men seated beside women. This deliberate positioning seems to suggest that the interaction between men and women is central to Oliveira’s interest. The film starts with Macário’s voiceover, which exemplifies the male perspective present throughout the film: “What you would not tell your wife, what you would not tell your friend, tell it to a stranger”. In classical cinema, the male voiceover is “autobiographical”, “self-revealing” and “associated with characters that have been scarred by a major trauma” (Silverman 1998: 52). As Kaja Silverman claims, the history of Hollywood films is dominated by the male voiceover, which offers a masculine viewpoint on the film narrative (ibid.: 48). Accordingly, in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, Oliveira privileges a male perspective of the events through the use of voiceover, flashbacks and subjective point of view. Macário’s viewpoint is emphasised by subjective camera shots while he watches Luísa from a distance, allowing the spectator to identify with him. Macário is seduced by the beauty of this mysterious girl who sits every day by the window holding a Chinese fan. His words of admiration betray his feelings of love and also highlight Luísa’s exceptional beauty: “She waved her fan so gracefully that you cannot even begin to imagine it”; “Miss, you are so young and like a breath of fresh air”; “I am never tired of gazing at the portrait you gave me”. Throughout the film, Macário is portrayed as a well-educated, hardworking, decent and sensible young man who falls madly in love with the wrong girl. In order to marry Luísa, Macário is compelled to break off relations with his uncle, who opposes his marriage, and to leave the country in order to earn enough money to secure their life together. After many sacrifices undertaken while working in Cape Verde, Macário returns to his hometown where he can finally be reunited with his beloved. However, Macário’s romance is abruptly interrupted when he discovers that his fiancée of angelic, virginal appearance is a kleptomaniac who has stolen both from the store of Macário’s uncle and from a jewellery store where the two lovers went to buy Luísa’s engagement ring. As a result, Macário suffers a nervous breakdown from which he is not able to recover. Importantly, Oliveira shocks the film audience with a ‘twist’ ending implying that women are not what they seem to be at first sight. The film seems to suggest that, far from being angelic creatures, women are incomprehensible, unpredictable and a constant torment for their male counterparts. The portrayal of Luísa is constructed through elements intended to depict her as mysterious and distant. For example, Luísa’s habitual gesture of hiding her face behind a beautifully decorated Chinese fan is symbolic of the psychological distance between her and Macário. She rarely speaks and never shows any kind of feeling for Macário, who is madly in love and would do anything in order to marry her. Oliveira astutely suggests the distance between Luísa and Macário by employing different camera angles. On the one hand, Macário is often shot from a high angle denoting his vulnerability as he looks up towards his beloved. On the other hand, angelic Luísa is shot with a low angle, placing

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

137

her in an apparently unattainable position as the object of Macário’s desire—as indeed, he is several times denied permission to marry Luísa due to the discrepancy between their respective social status and wealth. On a symbolic level, Macário embodies the fairy-tale figure of Prince Charming, whose greatest desire is to save the beautiful princess Luísa from herself. Unfortunately, unlike in fairy tales, Macário’s story does not have a happy ending; Luísa refuses to change or, rather, she refuses to be saved. Oliveira’s film conforms to the representational patterns of classical Hollywood films in which women are situated within a framework of traditional female stereotypes, depicting them as hysterical, paranoid, neurotic or having personality disorders (Doane 1987). According to feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane (1987), films such as Stella Dallas (1937), The Letter (1940), Suspicion (1941), Mildred Pierce (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) exemplify the tendency of early Hollywood cinema to frame women as passive, deceiving, traumatised or psychologically disturbed. These female characters represent a threat to the male universe and are often punished for their unconventional behaviour. Similar patterns that stereotype and vilify female characters are encountered in Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Belle Toujours. These two films not only emphasise the male gaze and perspective but also reinforce outdated and regressive representational paradigms as a characteristic of auteur cinema: even if Oliveira’s work is formally framed as distinct from, or challenging to the classical Hollywood mode, his representational politics in relation to women are inescapably aligned with this type of filmmaking.

Transcendental Voyeurism and the Danger of Secret Pleasures The Strange Case of Angelica (2010) represents a particular case in the filmography of the Portuguese director, as a long-desired project of Oliveira, who wrote its script in 1952, nearly half a century before he finally received the subvention needed to direct it. As Oliveira explains in an interview, the act of denying subventions was a covert way for the Second Republic to censor many of his film projects, including this one (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 137). As Oliveira further claims, the film was inspired by a personal event that left a strong imprint on him: when he was asked to take a photo of a recently deceased young woman wearing a white bridal dress (ibid.: 136). Accordingly, the film follows the story of Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), a young Jewish photographer commissioned to take photos of a deceased young woman, and who falls in love with her. While Isaac gazes at her through his camera lens, Angélica (Pilar López de Ayala) suddenly opens her eyes and smiles at him. It is a private vision seen solely through his camera, which through identification extends also to the film viewer. That experience will change the life of the young and sensible photographer forever. His visions of Angélica, who starts visiting him every night from the hereafter, gradually drive

138 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

him crazy. Here, Oliveira illustrates a ‘transcendental’ voyeurism—one that bridges the gap between reality and fantasy, between the worldly realm and mysticism. Importantly, it is under Angélica’s spell that hardworking Isaac becomes a voyeur; he is bewitched by this ethereal being to such an extent that he loses his reason and autonomy and lives solely for his visions. Oliveira dedicates a considerable amount of screen time to building a complex portrayal of young Isaac. The resemblance with Macário, the male protagonist from the previous film, is evident. Firstly, the roles of Isaac and Macário are both played by the actor Ricardo Trêpa, grandson of Manoel de Oliveira. Secondly, Isaac is also a well-educated and hardworking young man, who just happens to fall in love with the wrong woman, seduced by her beauty and virginal appearance. As in the case of Macário, Isaac’s life is irreversibly turned up-side-down by the encounter with this alluring, but unattainable, woman. Isaac is an intellectual figure, interested in poetry, photography and theological thought. The beginning of the film shows him reciting a poem about angels, which denotes his interest in immateriality and predicts his later close encounter with Angélica, an incorporeal being who opens a different ‘reality’ to him. The scenes of Isaac and Angélica flying through the sky while embracing each other are a powerful reminder of the bridal couples from Marc Chagall’s paintings (see Fig. 8.1). Oliveira’s choice to replicate the images of the renowned painter Chagall bears suggestive similarities: Isaac, similarly to Chagall, is a Jewish artist who escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing abroad (this latter detail is mentioned in the original script, but is missing from Oliveira’s subsequent film) (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 137).

Fig. 8.1  The image of Isaac and Angélica which resembles the famous paintings of Marc Chagall

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

139

Photographer Isaac observes the world through the lens of his camera and notices what other people cannot see. After the encounter with Angélica, he becomes a voyeur not only of a material world but also of a transcendental one. Isaac has now access to a dual world, a visible and an invisible one, and shifts between the two dimensions with such ease that even the film’s viewers find it hard to distinguish reality from illusion. Mulvey’s (1985) concept of scopophilia is exemplified in this film, with Isaac a privileged voyeur slowly consumed by an impossible love. The frustrating dream sequences in which he is either unable to reach her hands, or is dropped from the sky by Angélica, reveal the dangers of his secret love. Isaac’s pleasure from looking proves to be deadly, as he will never be able to attain his object of desire. Furthermore, Isaac’s reflections in the mirror during his night visions are a sign of schizophrenic duality and progressive madness. According to Mulvey (1985), cinema is the ideal place for scopophilia. However, in The Strange Case of Angelica, Oliveira returns to the origins of early cinema and designates photography as the locus of pleasure from looking. Isaac’s first encounters with the ghost are mediated either by the camera lens or by the materiality of photographs. The professional photographer, embodied by Isaac, is the prime voyeur, granted the privilege of discovering and taking pleasure from a world inaccessible to others. Oliveira does not depict a woman of flesh and blood, as in Belle Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, but an etheric being who seduces from the hereafter. Angélica, her name directly referencing the word ‘angel’, is in this story the ‘angel of death’, whose smile and ghostly presence drive Isaac insane and ultimately bring him death. Despite her virginal appearance, she is nevertheless a dangerous and ambiguous woman, bringing both joy and torment. Similar to Luísa in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, Angélica has a destructive influence on the male protagonist who is doomed by their encounter. The story thus becomes a mythic-masculinist construction of the impossibility of a complete union with the woman he loves, with men and women framed as simply belonging to different worlds. This film shares with Belle Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl a depiction of the female protagonist exclusively through a male perspective. Angélica’s role in the film consists in being looked at, exhibited as a passive object of spectacle for the male gaze. She is literally displayed—as a corpse—both at home and in the church, where others comment on her physical beauty and youthfulness. Static and immobile, Angélica becomes the object onto which Isaac’s phantasies and dreams are projected. Ultimately, the pleasure derived from her virginal appearance and angelic smile is lethal for the male protagonist, suggesting the danger that women pose, in Oliveira’s view, to the world of men.

Case Study: Belle Toujours (Manoel de Oliveira, 2006) Oliveira’s Belle Toujours (2006) is an ideal case study for this chapter since the film epitomises all the concepts discussed earlier: the male gaze, scopophilia, voyeurism and excessive stereotyping located within the virgin/whore

140 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

­ ichotomy. The film is a tribute to legendary auteur Luis Buñuel and conceived d of as a sequel to Buñuel’s acclaimed film Belle de Jour (1967). Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival in 1967, Buñuel’s film narrates the story of Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful housewife happily married to a wealthy surgeon who decides to spend her afternoons as a prostitute in a luxury Parisian brothel. The film was based on Joseph Kessel’s novel of the same name published originally in French in 1928 and translated into English only in 1962 due to its controversial status. As Kessel (2007) argues in the novel’s preface, his intentions were to reflect on the duality between body and soul, between the demands of the senses and the truthfulness of a great love. Buñuel’s Belle de Jour enhances this duality through the parallel structure of the film that alternates the original plot with day-dreaming sequences that illustrate Séverine’s sadomasochistic fantasies and flashbacks from her past hinting to her sexual abuse as a child. However, Oliveira’s Belle Toujours returns to a linear structure in which everything happens here and now, in a very short timeframe reminiscent of French New Wave auteur cinema. The viewer is challenged to piece the film together as he/she is given very few clues about Buñuel’s film whose story Oliveira expands. Importantly, Oliveira’s refusal to use flashbacks, or any narrative device that would link together the two stories/films, is emblematic of his provocative claim that he tries to “stick to facts” and to “eliminate the subjective, the sentimental, the psychological” (Johnson 2007: 147). Arguably, the Portuguese filmmaker refuses to provide any information that would help the viewer to interpret Belle Toujours in the light of Buñuel’s film in the firm belief that—as he further claimed in the same interview—any attempt to try to understand facts would profoundly alter them (ibid.). From a cinematic point of view, the film reiterates Oliveira’s unmistakable style: long shots, static camera, symbolic objects, emphasis on dialogues and the use of gender stereotypes. Given the highly symbolic content of Belle Toujours and its constant references to Belle de Jour and, more generally, to Buñuel’s work, the film is not easily accessible to a general audience. Thus, the film needs to be analysed and understood as a tribute to Luis Buñuel and also in the context of Oliveira’s work. In De Baecque and Parsi’s (1996: 147) interview collection, the Portuguese auteur expresses his admiration for Buñuel, claiming that they both belong to the same filmmaking ‘family’, and further notes that his Mediterranean roots place him closer to Buñuel than to Bergman. Such statements situate him squarely in a territory that ‘fetishises’ European auteurism, but replicates outdated representational paradigms, disguising them in aesthetics, which create a pretence of challenge to the classical form. Returning to Oliveira’s Belle Toujours, the narrative continues the story of Séverine Serizy (Bulle Ogier), reunited after thirty-eight  years with her husband’s best friend, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli). The character of Henri plays a crucial role in both films. In Belle de Jour, he acts as an ‘agent of corruption’ for Séverine: he openly flirts with her, provoked by her contempt for him,

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

141

and also provides her with the address of the brothel. In Belle Toujours, Henri’s character does not seem to have changed much: he is an alcoholic womaniser, who chases and unsuccessfully attempts to provoke Séverine. Two key aspects must be highlighted in relation to the portrayal of women in this film. Firstly, Séverine’s portrayal is articulated through an exclusively male perspective: from her first appearance when Henri’s gaze notices her at the theatre, to her story told by Henri to a barman and the dinner scene where she answers Henri’s inquisitive questions. Henri is the active bearer of the story: he notices Séverine in the audience of a concert in Paris and continues to observe and stalk her until he finally achieves a long-desired meeting by candlelight. Despite Séverine’s efforts to hide, to make herself invisible, she cannot escape Henri’s quest and becomes a passive object of Henri’s voyeuristic gaze. As in both classical cinema and the patriarchal paradigms of European auteurism, “the male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 1985: 309). In fact, in the first two-thirds of the film, Oliveira constructs the image of a woman who is far beyond any imaginable limit of depravation and perversity—representing Henri’s viewpoint. Instead, the last third of the film depicts her in a diametrically opposed situation. Séverine is now widowed and dismisses her past, claiming that she leads a lonely life far away from her former lustful pleasures. She states that she has changed and is a different woman now. However, even this final scene of the dinner, in which, notably, Séverine speaks for the very first time, does not shed much light on her controversial story and mysterious personality: it is Henri who leads the dialogue, while she merely answers his questions. This dialogue only enhances Henri’s claim that “women were always Nature’s greatest enigma”, a statement seemingly endorsed by Oliveira in all three films, together with the implicit suggestion of women’s incomprehensibility and deceitfulness. Throughout the film, Henri voyeuristically observes, through subjective shots, artificial female figures like the statue of Joan of Arc, paintings of nude women in the bar and naked mannequins in a shop window. These scenes exemplify the primordial fascination with looking described by Mulvey (1985) in her seminal article. In a similar way to Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and The Strange Case of Angelica, the male protagonist exercises his pleasure of looking upon women who are objectified, voiceless, distant and unattainable. In Belle Toujours, the objectification of women is taken to an extreme, as the act of looking is directed not only to female characters but also to representations of women, indicating a male universe dominated by scopophilic pleasures. Secondly, this film explicitly uses the virgin/whore dichotomy; by comparing Belle de Jour and Belle Toujours, one can notice two diametrically opposed processes performed in Buñuel’s and Oliveira’s films. If Buñuel turns his female character from a housewife into a whore, Oliveira’s choice is to turn a prostitute into a ‘virgin’. However, at either of the two poles of the dichotomy, Séverine’s main feature is her sexuality. On the one hand, Henri describes her as extremely attractive, perverted, masochistic and sadistic. On the other hand, the golden equestrienne statue located in front of Séverine’s hotel carries an

142 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

additional layer of symbolism, as it points to the story of Joan of Arc, the virginal maid unjustly accused of heresy and executed by burning, whose reputation was later rehabilitated and who was ultimately declared innocent. This association of lustful Séverine with the popular figure of Joan of Arc, indicates an attempt to restore her image, but simultaneously posits her against an unattainable ideal. Ultimately, despite Séverine’s claim of a new-found religious life and radical transformation, the brief moments in which she speaks make her assertions unbelievable for Henri and, by extension, the audience. Her excessive carnality, transgression and unconformity to patriarchal values implicitly condemn her as a fallen woman and consequently represented as lonely, emotionally distant and uncommunicative. From the feminist perspective, this type of depiction of voiceless characters strips away their power within the film narrative (Thimmes 1998: 201). Importantly, Belle Toujours features several minor male characters who serve their clients with dignity and professionalism (they are bartenders, waiters or receptionists). On the contrary, the only minor female characters featuring in the film are two prostitutes spending their time in a bar where they try to attract Henri’s attention and to eavesdrop on his conversation with the bartender. Not particularly attractive, the two prostitutes are frivolous and concerned only with gaining men’s interest (they flirt with both Henri and the young bartender). However, the male protagonist is completely uninterested in them, so the two women disappointedly conclude that “he is ignoring us”, just as the director ignores women’s voices and perspectives throughout the film. Oliveira’s female characters remain passive, speak very little and, when they finally do, their speech revolves solely around men (thus, the film would surely not pass the Bechdel test). The bar is also decorated with paintings of female nudes to which Henri’s gaze is directed right before starting to narrate Séverine’s story. The timing of this scene and Henri’s amused reaction while looking at a nude painting on the wall anticipates his story, while pointing to Séverine’s past and promiscuous behaviour. Belle Toujours seems to indicate that sexuality and carnality are common denominators for women. Arguably, Séverine is depicted as the most depraved and perverted prostitute; in fact, after hearing the story about Séverine, the barman claims that the two prostitutes in the bar are “angels” by comparison since they “don’t have a husband to cheat on, or hide secrets from!”. It is worth noting that the scene in which Henri narrates to the barman about Séverine’s lustful past marked by sexual perversion and sadomasochistic behaviour is artistically framed by a mirror. The viewers watch Henri at the bar from behind, his face visible only in the mirror. The bartender, instead, is directly facing the audience, with his back to the mirror (see Fig. 8.2). At times, Henri is turned sideways and the audience can observe both his face and its reflection in the mirror. Besides the aesthetic beauty of Henri’s confession captured indirectly as a reflection, this scene is charged with symbolism. The mirror is a symbol of introspection, indicating a split personality for the character who is mirrored in it. Moreover, the mirror opens an additional space in the frame, a

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

143

Fig. 8.2  Henri’s discussion with the barman is artistically framed by a mirror in Belle Toujours

space that duplicates Henri’s story and, at the same time, interrogates its truthfulness. Is the story real or is it a projection, the fruit of Henri’s imagination? In fact, Henri casts a shadow of doubt on his story straight from the beginning when he claims to tell a “story that never happened”. His story is so surreal that it is hard to believe and seems rather a work of fiction than reality. Whether we interpret Henri’s perspective as fantasy or not, the representation of these female characters, directing us to read them as dominated by their own carnal nature, lingers. It is worth noting that Oliveira places a strong symbolic emphasis on traffic lights, showing Henri crossing the street on red while chasing the object of his sexual desire. The red traffic lights denote danger and implicitly suggest forbidden sexuality, pointing to a morally unacceptable direction towards which Henri is headed, without being censured by society simply because he is a man. A similar point is made by film critic Peter Bradshaw (2017) in his retrospective review of Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour. According to the film critic, Buñuel invites his audience to reflect on the transgression of a respectable housewife who secretly works in a brothel. However, as Bradshaw astutely points out, the widespread gender stereotypes make viewers question only the woman’s wrongdoing, overlooking the fact that otherwise ‘respectable’ men would patronise such establishments in broad daylight. There seems to be a discrepancy between the way society censures men and women for similar types of behaviour.

144 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

Conclusion To sum up Oliveira’s female characters in these three films: a sadomasochist prostitute wishing to become a nun, an apparently decent girl who is a kleptomaniac and a dead beauty who visits and troubles an innocent young man affecting his mental health. All three female characters, dead or alive, are unattainable and the male protagonists spend most of their time chasing them (Séverine), trying to talk with them or to see them (Séverine, Luísa, Angélica) and being in love with them (Luísa, Angélica). Women are distant, both psychologically and physically: Séverine hides from Henri, Macário watches Luísa through the window, Angélica is an untouchable ghost. Moreover, these female characters are most of the time silent presences, their silence adding to the mystery of their persona. Thus, the female figure in Oliveira’s films is always depicted from a male perspective and is situated on an inaccessible level for the male protagonists who can adore her, desire her, but never fully understand her. According to feminist film scholar Ann E. Kaplan (1998: 81), female characters in classical Hollywood cinema “symbolise all that is evil and mysterious”, while their male counterparts play the role of investigators who retell “something that happened in the past” and seek to “unravel the mystery”. Both films Belle Toujours and Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl follow this pattern in which the male protagonist confesses to a total stranger a chapter of their past in an attempt to understand women whose actions seem to defy any logic. In Belle Toujours, Henri retells the strange story of a woman who needed to prostitute herself in order to be able to love her husband, while in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, Macário narrates the hidden vice of Luísa, the woman who turned his life up-side-down. In The Strange Case of Angelica, instead, the process of retelling the story is absent because the male protagonist, enamoured of a dead girl does not survive her charm to tell the story. All main female characters in Oliveira’s three films, namely Séverine, Luísa and Angélica, are reminders of the mysterious femme fatale, both fascinating and destructive for their male counterparts. Furthermore, the male protagonists Henri, Macário and Isaac, are the active agents who propel the story forward. They are the ones who introduce the female characters: by observing them, by talking about them or by photographing them. The female characters instead are passive and, as objects of male desire, depicted as blonde-haired women of angelic beauty. They each seem to lack any particular profession or interest: Séverine is a housewife, Luísa does not seem to have any occupation, while Angélica is dead. The male protagonists are not drawn towards these three women because they are clever, capable or independent, but only because of their physical appearance. Importantly, Oliveira’s films portray women as objects of the sexual desire of men, as seductresses located within the virgin/whore dichotomy. Whether framed as belonging to one category or the other, these women are defined in sexual terms and their portrayal sketched through sexual stereotypes. Angélica is the prototype of the beautiful, virginal bride (she wears a white dress), who has mysteriously died shortly after her wedding. Similarly, Luísa is placed in the

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

145

‘virgin’ category and she spends most of her days being-looked-at by the enamoured Macário. However, her secret kleptomania casts a shadow of doubt regarding her innocence and purity. Séverine, too, is an ambiguous figure, split between the duality of her past as a prostitute and her present claims of being drawn towards monastic life. Furthermore, Oliveira rejects modern trends of cinematic representation by employing outdated stereotypes of women—seen as mysterious, incomprehensible and dangerous human beings. In the same vein, Cruchinho (2008: 51) argues that “Oliveira only approaches the female character through the male character, as if he was the mediator, a channel of vision behind which the filmmaker hides comfortably”. While it is difficult to explain why Oliveira would adopt such a radical, dissenting choice, his films clearly make a firm statement against modern gendered representations and invite for a revival of male-centred auteurism. To some extent, it can be argued that such representation reflects the filmmaker’s personal vision of women. In an interview in the 1990s, Oliveira stated that he never felt comfortable with women, whose universe he considered both fascinating and something to pull back from (De Baecque and Parsi 1996: 99). Furthermore, Oliveira’s antiquated portrayal of women is very much in tune with other stylistic choices in his films, which are permeated by a strong sense of nostalgia for the past, and characterised by a slow rhythm, a desire to freeze the action into moments of contemplation. Through the stylistic choices and gendered dynamics of his films, Oliveira seems to profess a desire to return cinema to its early stages of European auteurism, to stop the unravelling of time and the modern, fast-paced changes that our contemporary world brings. Before concluding, there is an important question that rises at this point: how did Manoel de Oliveira manage to employ, in his most recent work, such radical choices which problematise—perhaps even oppose—contemporary approaches to the representation of women, without losing his audience, and in fact gaining appreciation and acclaim, especially in Europe? A possible answer for this question is found if one considers the fact that Oliveira is a longstanding, internationally renowned, auteur filmmaker of Portuguese cinema. Firstly, his international recognition as an art filmmaker, and the particular style that defines him as an auteur, has allowed him not to compromise on his aesthetic choices and to dissent from contemporary trends in filmmaking. Secondly, his location within Portuguese cinema has granted him a certain independence that many other European filmmakers do not have—due to commercial mechanisms of financing and production in Europe. According to Mary Wood (2007: 28–29), Portugal’s marginality, both geographically and culturally, creates an optimal environment for “the continuation of a hermetic art” that allows the exploration of “social change, political and gender issues without the compromises, or advantages, of its neighbours”. Oliveira’s personal filmic vision and international fame, coupled with a favourable production context within Portuguese cinema, may together explain such an antiquated image of women that dissents from contemporary canons of representation, while performing a process of nostalgic return to a highly patriarchal form of auteurism.

146 

I. LEWIS AND I. SEVER GLOBAN

Questions for Group Discussion . Discuss why Manoel de Oliveira can be considered an auteur. 1 2. Examine whether the male gaze theory can be applied to other films made by Manoel de Oliveira since the year 2000. 3. Discuss any other auteur films released in the twenty-first century that adopt a rigid portrayal of women. 4. What are the risks associated with adopting regressive images of women in films made by renowned auteurs? How do you think modern audiences react to such depictions? 5. Can you identify films made by prominent European auteurs who challenge stereotyped depictions of women?

References Andrews, David. 2013. Theorizing Art Cinema: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benshoff, Harry M. 2015. Film and Television Analysis: An Introduction to Methods, Theories, and Approaches. London: Routledge. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2013. Film Art: An Introduction. 10th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bradshaw, Peter. 2017. Belle de Jour Review: Catherine Deneuve Is Extraordinary in a Secret Theatre of Erotic Shame. The Guardian, September 6. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/06/belle-de-jour-review-luis-bunuel-catherinedeneuve-erotic-shame. Accessed 30 August 2018. Cook, Pam. 1990. Authorship. In The Women’s Companion to International Film, ed. Annette Kuhn and Susannah Radstone, 31–32. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 2007. Auteurism and Women Directors. In The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook, 468–473. London: British Film Institute. Cruchinho, Fausto. 2008. The Woman in thee Shop Window and the Man Looking at Her: The Politics of the Look in Manoel de Oliveira’s Oeuvre. In Dekalog: On Manoel de Oliveira, ed. Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, 49–59. London: Wallflower Press. Da Costa, João Bénard. 2008. The Touchstone: The So-Called Eternal Feminine in Manoel de Oliveira. In Dekalog: On Manoel de Oliveira, ed. Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, 9–48. London: Wallflower Press. De Baecque, Antoine, and Jacques Parsi. 1996. Conversations avec Manoel de Oliveira. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma. Doane, Mary Ann. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940’s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Etherington-Wright, Christine, and Ruth Doughty. 2011. Understanding Film Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fowler, Catherine. 2002. Introduction to Part Three. In The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler, 87–93. London and New York: Routledge. Hayward, Susan. 2000. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

8  THE NEW/OLD PATRIARCHAL AUTEURISM: MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA, THE MALE… 

147

Holliday, Ruth. 2008. Media and Popular Culture. In Introducing Gender and Women’s Studies, ed. Diane Richardson and Victoria Robinson, 187–204. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Randal. 2003. Against the Grain: On the Cinematic Vision of Manoel de Oliveira. Senses of Cinema (28). http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/de_oliveira/. Accessed 20 September 2016. ———. 2005. Journey to the Beginning of the World. In The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, ed. Alberto Mira, 209–217. London: Wallflower Press. ———. 2007. Manoel de Oliveira. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2018. Political Oliveira. In Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture, ed. Mariana Liz, 47–66. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Kaplan, E.  Ann. 1998. The Place of Women in Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia. In Women in Film Noir, ed. Ann Kaplan, 10th ed., 81–88. London: British Film Institute. Kessel, Joseph. 2007. Belle de Jour: A Novel. New York: Peter Mayer Publishers. Lewis, Ingrid. 2017. Women in European Holocaust Films: Perpetrators, Victims and Resisters. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Liz, Mariana. 2018. Introduction: Framing the Global Appeal of Contemporary Portuguese Cinema. In Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture, ed. Mariana Liz, 1–14. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Mennel, Barbara. 2019. Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mira, Alberto. 2005. Introduction. In The Cinema of Spain and Portugal, ed. Alberto Mira, 1–11. London: Wallflower Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1985. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols, II ed., 303–315. Berkeley; Los Angeles; and London: University of California Press. Originally Published in 1973. Overhoff Ferreira, Carolin. 2008. Introduction: Manoel de Oliveira and the Art of Filming Doubt. In Dekalog: On Manoel de Oliveira, ed. Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, 1–8. London: Wallflower Press. ———. 2018. Portugal, Europe and the World: Geopolitics and the Human Condition in Manoel de Oliveira’s Films. In Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture, ed. Mariana Liz, 67–85. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Reynolds, Siân. 2006. Mistresses of Creation: Women as Producers and Consumers of Art Since 1700. In The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700, ed. Deborah Simonton, 341–379. London and New York: Routledge. Sellier, Geneviève. 2008. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. Durham and London: Durham University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1998. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sjö, Sofia. 2007. Are Female Messiahs Changing the Myth? Women, Religion and Power in Popular Culture and Society. In Reconfigurations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion in a Post-Secular Society, ed. Stefanie Knauss and Alexander D. Ornella, 59–72. Vienna: Lit-Verlag. Thimmes, Pamela. 1998. Memory and Re-Vision: Mary Magdalene Research Since 1975. Currents in Research 6: 193–226. Van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2004. Feminist Media Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Wood, Mary P. 2007. Contemporary European Cinema. London: Hodder Arnold.

CHAPTER 9

The Latest European New Wave: Cinematic Realism and Everyday Aesthetics in Romanian Cinema Doru Pop

Definitions New Wave Cinema The ‘New Wave’ is an aesthetic approach specific to European cinema, later integrated in many other global film practices. The Nouvelle Vague is the bestknown version of the European ‘waves’, developed by French filmmakers during the 1960s. Other forms of cinematic realism, like Italian neorealism or British social realism, share similar shooting techniques based on a mobile camera, actual locations, on-location recording of sound, abrupt editing and nonconventional narratives. The ‘new wave’ is a generic term for numerous cinematic approaches using the observational technique providing the spectator with a direct experience of reality. New Cinema A fundamental distinction must be made between the New Wave as cinematic movement and the ‘new cinemas’, like the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Although directly related to neorealism and other ‘new wave’ practices, the New Cinemas are more politically engaged, with an anti-colonialist component and with

D. Pop (*) Faculty of Theater and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_9

149

150 

D. POP

counter-cinema purposes, applicable especially to productions belonging to the so-called Third Cinema, often reactions against the hegemonic film discourses of Western films. Cinema-as-Truth, cinéma vérité (kino-pravda) The rediscovery of direct cinema techniques, as used in the early Soviet cinema experiments made by Dziga Vertov, allowed both the development of Italian Neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague. This encouraged the practice of on-location shooting and a documentary-style representation of life; thus many film critics noted early on the relationship between such neorealist practices and Romanian contemporary cinema; the post-2000 filmmakers were described as either “neorealist” (Șerban 2009: 55–56) or, later, “neoneorealist” (Mihăilescu 2012: 189). Cinematic Realism Realism, defined as a cinematographic style in fiction films, is often simplistically identified with the theories of André Bazin, improperly described as Bazinism (Gorzo 2012). Documentary-like camera techniques and the presumed objectivity resulting from capturing ordinary life generate an aesthetic realism in cinema which allows the claim that reality in film is a result of the ontological nature of the photographic camera. These do not take into account that the representation of ‘everyday life’, which has profound social meaning through depicting people at the margins of society, has a powerful realist effect.

Introduction: A New Cinema or a New Wave? Contemporary Romanian filmmakers are internationally recognized as some of the most important directors in world cinema. Feature films like Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) are considered by international film critics to qualify amongst the best productions of the twenty-first century (according to a 2018 BBC Culture poll). Some have called this cinema a “miracle” (Nasta 2013); others, less enthusiastically, describe it as a manifestation of a “hesitant modernity” (Strausz 2017), while other critics have simply ignored these films’ existence (Galt 2006). There are several competing definitions circulating in Romanian national film criticism, as elaborated during the last two decades. As Romanian cinema produced more than 100 feature films, critics were simultaneously trying to explain this cinematic phenomenon. Manifested as a post-2000 revival of the Romanian film industry, this direction in national cinema was early on labelled “the new Romanian cinema”. The term, coined by film critic Alex Leo Șerban, at the time the main public promoter of this new generation of filmmakers, accounted for the novelty of their filmmaking approaches. Alternative terms

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

151

are also used such as “the new Romanian film” (Dinescu 2014; Ferencz-Flatz 2015) or the more neutral notion “recent Romanian cinema”. In an early theoretical evaluation (Pop 2010) the ‘new cinema’ formula was contested, which led to the elaborating of the more narrow concept, that of new-new cinema. As suggested by Căliman (2007), the most suitable concept was “new wave of Romanian cinema” or “Romanian New Wave cinema” (Pop 2014). From an aesthetic, narrative and cultural perspective, the remarkable films made after 2000 were inspired by the traditions of all European ‘New Waves’, integrating elements from Italian Neorealism, British social realism, the Dogme movement and numerous other Central European experiments. More importantly, they shared the same qualities as the French Nouvelle Vague, which justifies describing the most relevant recent films as ‘the latest European New Wave’. Another relevant aspect is that these films and their directors are clearly connected to the paradigms of European cinema (see Pop 2014: 14), and more specifically to a type of filmmaking that belongs to the tradition of European cinematic realism. While issues of realism are complex, the logic of the European New Waves can be reduced to a couple of practices, linked to the use of the cinema apparatus as an instrument of truth and authenticity. There is a certain “reality effect” (Barthes 2010: 140) which is also obtained outside the camerawork, based on narrative strategies that work to make viewers participants in the storytelling. Last but not least, this is a philosophical approach to reality itself, where lived experience of events that ‘really happened’ generates a different type of cinematic representation.

The Revival of the Romanian Film Industry Within European Cinema After 1989, as Romania transitioned from a communist regime to capitalism, the national film industry gradually went into collapse. The year 2000 marked the lowest point of this cultural catastrophe. From over 40 feature films made annually during the communist era, that year no new Romanian film was produced. It was only after gradual access to European Union financing, as part of the integration of Romania into the community, that the creation of new films became possible. It is also relevant that the ‘rebirth’ of Romanian cinema coincided with the opening of negotiations with the European Commission, which started in February 2000, a process that opened the path for Romania’s full membership of the Union being finalized in 2007. One of the most important supporters of young Romanian cinema-makers became Eurimages, the Council of Europe fund, as the industry opened to co-productions and international collaborations. By 2016 film production had recovered, with 25 new films created, most of these with partial support from public or private European and national funds. This was a direction in cinema responding to Resolution 88 of the Council of Europe (1988), which stated that financed films were designed to “promote Europe’s cultural identity”.

152 

D. POP

Integrating into the Paradigms of European Cinema When considering ‘European cinema’, concepts and definitions become extremely problematic and complex, mostly because the culture and history of the continent are complicated. This is a phenomenon impossible to describe within a unified formula, although many have tried. One of the larger and more inclusive approaches is provided by Thomas Elsaesser (2005). Considering that all European films belong to a common cultural discourse and that they share the same historical heritage, or a common “historical imaginary” (Elsaesser 2005: 21–23), this author contrasts cinéma de qualité, or art cinema, with the commercially driven Hollywood film industry (Elsaesser 2005: 16–17). A similarly suggestive set of explanations is provided by Everett (2005), who identifies several distinctive features of a common European film tradition, among them; the searching for identity through difference, a subversive and critical attitude towards power and the exploration of the troubled past, coupled with the exploration of the processes of memory (Everett 2005: 10–13). It is in such small and personal histories, linked with a traumatic experience of the past, where issues of conflicting identities are clashing, and where moral questions are raised by social conditions, that a European way of storytelling takes shape. Another important aspect is that as in the case of the other European New Waves, especially those made by Central and Eastern European filmmakers, Romanian directors are searching for social experiences that discover ‘life as it is’. While this process has a strong socially critical purpose, it is not necessarily ‘political’. With its roots in the naturalist aesthetics manifested early on in literature and painting, this type of cinema focuses on social groups which are ‘discarded’ by society (prostitutes, the unemployed, the homeless), contrasting strongly with the ‘feelgood’ or bourgeois storytelling cultivated in mainstream films. Naturalistic settings and smaller-than-life characters are systematically investigated by using naturalistic language and, often excessively brutal behaviour, which can be seen as providing access to a dimension of human existence intimately linked with authenticity. Many of these films are purposefully created as ‘slices of life’ (see Pop 2014: 58–63), based on news stories, real events or real situations inspired by personal experiences from the biography of the directors. Whether serving an autobiographical function or inspired by real-life stories, these narratives are selected precisely because they describe a reality with which spectators can connect.

The Aesthetic of Everyday Life There is an apparent aesthetic simplicity to these films, sometimes coupled with reduced temporal and spatial dimensions in the storytelling. Most of the stories take place within the framework of 24  hours and in very limited spaces. It seemed justified for many film critics to describe the cinema made by the new generation of Romanian directors as “minimalist” (Nasta 2013: 155). While minimalism is an art form in which representations are reduced to their simplest structure in order to amplify content, cinematic minimalism is not

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

153

reductionist. A possible misunderstanding comes from applying minimalism pejoratively, defining it as a ‘low budget realism’ and implying aesthetic as well as production poverty. Although these films are often made with a limited budget, their use of location shooting and the austerity of their resources have a philosophical intention. These are essentialist approaches based on a purposeful search for the purest modes of cinematic expression. Better described within the logic of the “aesthetics of everyday life” (Light and Smith 2005), the apparently uneventful and limited actions, austere settings, minimalist storylines and characters, refusal of complex editing and/or the exclusive use of natural sound and lighting, together with the lack of nondiegetic or extra-diegetic music, generate an overall experience that is not reduced but, paradoxically, amplified. Practiced by other European directors like Michael Haneke or Wim Wenders, cinematic minimalism is not a formal emptiness; neither is it void and neutral in meaning-making, and definitely not an expression of banality. There is an attention to detail present, and an effort to manage simple elements, which accentuates significance.

Art Cinema and ‘Auteur’ Politics Another limiting understanding of this type of cinema is to identify it as ‘art cinema’, sometimes even attributing to these films the ‘art house’ label. Many critics are quick to follow Dudley Andrew (Andrew 1984: 5–6), who suggests that films belonging to “high culture” or “quality cinema” are “battling” with commercial, Hollywood-made films. Contrasting with American popular cinema, based on entertainment value and action, European films are seen to be characterized by an “aura” and an “elegance” which make them aesthetically relevant. Yet to attribute to all European films, and in particular these Romanian films, the exclusivist aura of high culture or ‘art house’ is incorrect. Such descriptions are also theoretically inconsistent, as they allow films with significantly divergent aesthetics to be considered as one category, that is, ‘art cinema’ (see White 2017). Linked to the idea of an art cinema is another stereotypical formula which explains these films as belonging to a presumed “authorial cinema” (Strausz 2017: 4). While alluding to the fact there is a certain ‘politique des auteurs’ in all the New Waves, the bias favouring a continental elitist cinema leads to improper usage of the term. It could indicate that these filmmakers are never successful outside the limited circle of film festivals, that ‘auteurism’ and ‘lack of popularity’ are intimately linked or that they are limited to reception in restrictive cinephile circles. While it is true that the festival circuits confirmed the ‘quality’ of recent Romanian productions, nevertheless these films are neither limited to an art house circuit of distribution, nor narratively or aesthetically pretentious or over-sophisticated. Contemporary Romanian productions are often extremely well received by global spectators and provide a form of cinematic storytelling which appeals both to mass audiences and to specialized critics. Such recognition confirms again that these films belong to a larger, European film culture. Even if they were initially ignored at home, they gained much-needed international recognition in major European film festivals and

154 

D. POP

were distributed by the most important European cinema networks. This trend continues today, as clearly indicated by overall financial data and the evolution of the reception of recent Romanian films. While at home they are definitely not profitable, revenues from European ticket sales, and the financial support of national agencies and European funds, give these filmmakers a chance in global competition (Mungiu 2016). Another important characteristic of recent Romanian cinema is its manifest transnational dimension. Because of the discrepancy between their reception by national and international markets, the directors themselves tend to approach narratives that may have a broader audience, beyond the Romanian public. This does not mean that they are ‘made for film festivals’, nor that international pressures are exerted on their making. They are simply targeting an ever-­ growing global audience, often composed of Western European cinephiles. It can be argued that this generates in turn a cultural hybridization at the expense of national specificity. While the effects of the ‘transnational turn’ are unavoidably changing the content of these films, some critics use the same arguments to evaluate the transformations happening in the contemporary Romanian film industry as a sign of postcolonial transition. Such a perspective places the films and their directors in a narrower regional context, where the post-national trend becomes an expression of provincialism and exoticism (Țut ̦ui 2012). Some critics place the Romanian filmmaking industry among the “small” European cinemas or the “cinema of small nations” (Hjort and Petrie 2007). Thus the effort of the director to go “beyond the national” is explained as part of a process of self-colonization (Imre 2012: 8–9). Other critics, in their effort to explain this paradoxical situation, use inconsistent concepts like “antinational-national cinema” (Goss 2015). While national particularities and political contexts make possible the definition of these films as ‘post-communist’, this narrow understanding of the postcolonial paradigm ignores the global impact of these filmmakers. The fact remains that an entire film industry has gone from total oblivion to international recognition and, more importantly, today many co-production companies seek out Romanian directors and filmmaking crews or actors for their potential, while companies founded by the directors themselves are financing and producing multinational projects. Far from being placed in a provincial position, or describable as only one among the “emerging cinemas” of the Balkans, swiftly ignored by critics (Ezra 2004), Romanian cinema cannot be limited to its political or social contexts. Treating it as a by-product of the Eastern European post-transition (Andreescu 2013) ignores the transnational dimension of European cinema, as pointed out by Rivi (2007). This trend brought the Romanian New Wave cinema-makers to the forefront of the internationalization process. Their works have been widely emulated, as the ‘Romanian style’ or the ‘Romanian way of making films’ today attracts many filmmakers from neighbouring countries and even Western Europe.

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

155

A Phoenix Rising from the Ashes of New Wave Stylistics While these cultural, philosophical, thematic and narrative explanations are significant, perhaps the element which best accounts for the naturalistic and realistic dimensions of this direction in filmmaking remains the camerawork. This is not simply based on the ontology of the photographic device, but it is a form of cinema that can be broadly associated with the “tradition of realism” (Aitken 2007), a particular mode of filmmaking that has its origins in the stylistics of cinéma vérité. When left-wing filmmakers in Italy and France rediscovered the practices of early Soviet cinematographers, this allowed the camera to function again as a technology of telling the truth. The second turning point was the management of visual and cinematic settings as living environments. While some critics hurriedly use simplistic concepts such as ‘Bazinism’ in order to explain the realism of the Romanian New Wave, this cinematic direction is not founded in the ‘basic realist imperative’. Rather, as Aitken pointed out, there is a “realist modality” manifested in an overall stylistics that provides the viewer with a naturalistic and documentary-like experience (Aitken 2007: 183–184). By using documentary-like camera approaches, which can be either observational or participative (see Pop 2014: 63–65), together with the refusal of artificiality, and opposing the canons of fiction cinema, Romanian filmmakers have developed their own version of realism. Cristi Puiu’s debut film Stuff and Dough (2001) showcases how one the most important cinematographic instruments of the Romanian New Wave remains the ‘liberation’ of the camera. In a combination of techniques designed to capture reality, in the way of free cinema or direct cinema experiments, the so-called handheld camera provides the viewer with the sensation of presence, a cinematic experience without the apparent intervention of the film director.

In Search of Cinematic Authenticity Manifesting an aversion to the artificiality of previous films (similar to the disdain for bourgeois films in the case of the Italian and French directors of the 1950s and the 1960s), this reactivated documentary-style cinematography, and aesthetics of immediacy, resulted in the resurrection of camera practices used by other Romanian directors. This includes filmmakers working during the 1960s or 1970s, like Lucian Pintilie with his masterpiece Reconstruction (1970) or Mircea Daneliuc with Microphone Test (1980), who practised this modality. Unfortunately, these experiments never accumulated into a school of cinema. As noted by Călin Căliman (2007) the “first signs” of a true New Wave cinema were manifested only after Cristi Puiu returned to the resources of the major European New Waves. While some mocked the jerky movements and unstable sensation provided by this type of camera, disdainfully rejecting the apparently inconsistent editing and banality of the settings (Stănescu 2016), all these devices were selected by design to provide the viewer with an experience of real life at an unprecedented scale in the national cinema.

156 

D. POP

Puiu’s innovation in terms of Romanian cinema was not only to use the camera as a neutral observer. The director himself acknowledged that he was trying to make a personal cinema in which to faithfully reproduce reality. This was part of a cinematic search for the ‘really-real’, using the camera, actors and narratives to mirror real existence as closely as possible. This effort to present the viewers with the utmost experience of reality might seem sometimes a form of grim and gritty realism, yet unlike the brutalist cinema or its miserabilist versions in national filmmaking, the Romanian New Wave remained driven by authenticity and not by any political purposes. Other important devices, based on the philosophy of cinematic authenticity, were used. This is the case with the long take, sometimes presented as an inherent predisposition of this cinema for plans-séquences. In fact, the longue durée has its roots in the refusal of excessive interventions. Avoiding the intervention of the director into the cinematic development closely follows Godard’s famous statement about editing—that every cut is a moral decision, not an aesthetic act (quoted by Gus Van Sant and Falsetto 2015: 81). As previously explained, the choice for long shots must be linked with the intention to present reality as closely as possible to its lived duration, and not with any artistic virtuosity.

The Inexhaustible Resources of New Wave Stylistics While they provide a fresh visual and aesthetic experience, the Romanian New Wave films display several characteristics that invalidate theories about the emergence of a ‘new cinema’. Ultimately there is nothing new in their cinematic treatment; contemporary Romanian directors do not discover some unknown cinema practices, but rather they return to the foundations of the Nouvelle Vague. The term, initially invented by Françoise Giroud (1958) to announce a new generation of filmmakers in France, was based on the coherence of films made by the same generation of authors like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) or Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). These productions capturing ‘reality as it unfolds’ and made by on-location shooting became an “artistic school”, sharing aesthetic and technical practices (Marie 2003: 78–79). Almost all the elements that demonstrate that this is in fact a New Wave style of cinema-making are illustrated by the early films of Cristi Puiu, who would soon become one of the leaders of the new generation. His first feature film, Stuff and Dough, exhibited a strong mastery of these techniques, which later would become the “Puiu style of cinema making” (Pop 2014: 43). The combination of handheld camera and location shooting, real-time action and acting style, coupled with an apparently minimalist narrative, with austere and naturalistic dialogue, accumulate into a coherent cinematic effect. Even though this approach was not in and of itself a novelty, it gradually included other codes of cinematic realism, as it was transformed into a trademark for many contemporary Romanian films. More authentic mises en scène in real locations were used, many more real stories were captured with this extreme realist technique and an unrelenting

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

157

exploration of human real life was put into action. Romanian directors went on and searched for the ‘real’, exploring different approaches to and versions of the same cinematic mechanics, which resulted in a new direction in Romanian cinema. Even if some books dedicated to the New Waves in cinema (Martin 2013) make absolutely no mention of these Romanian filmmakers, they are by now internationally visible and are generating some of the most interesting additions to the European film tradition. This chapter focuses on a case study, a mature work by Cristi Puiu, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu. The memorable stylistics of this film have been borrowed from, imitated and sometimes improved upon; however, it remains a quintessential example of the remarkable addition to the European Waves which is Romanian New Wave cinema. If the French New Wave was based on the works of the Truffaut-Godard duo, with The 400 Blows and Breathless considered the most representative examples, recent Romanian cinema has also been driven by competition between two important directors, Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu. Their feature films have received some of the most important international awards and recognition, and they are pivotal for understanding the Romanian ‘school of filmmaking’. The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, respectively, display some of the most important elements of the creative potential of New Wave practices, and both films showcase the characteristic cinematic language, syntax and even the specific ‘grammar’ that allowed the Romanian New Wave to become globally appreciated (see more in Pop 2010). The New York Times included The Death … in its top five most influential films of this century, while a poll initiated by BBC Culture placed Cristian Mungiu’s 4 months … amongst the top 20 films of the twenty-first century. In 2010 the Romanian Film Critics Association asked its members to respond to a poll of the top ten national films of all times and these two films came in third and fourth places. It is extremely difficult to choose between these two remarkable productions; yet, for the purpose of understanding the evolution of the Romanian New Wave, Puiu’s work takes chronological pre-eminence. An indepth analysis of this production provides useful insight into the overall mechanics of a particular mode of understanding cinema.

Case Study: The Death of Mr. La ̆zar ̆ escu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) Cristi Puiu remains one of the most important directors of recent Romanian cinema and his masterpiece was described by many critics as “paradigmatic” and “programmatic” (Stojanova and Duma 2012: 10–11). Alex Leo Șerban defined this production as a “cult film” (Șerban 2009: 262), even an “inciting” model for the entire Romanian “young cinema”. Others (Fulger 2011: 108) claimed it produced a real “revolution”, while many tried to explain its intricate qualities by describing it either as a road movie, a transcendental film or even a derisory form of cinema. Yet in order to understand why The Death of Mr.

158 

D. POP

Lăzărescu can be considered a representative film for the stylistics of the Romanian New Wave, a contextualized interpretation is necessary. It is relevant that the National Centre for Cinematography, the main national agency created to support cinema production in Romania, initially refused to finance this project. It took the intervention of the Ministry of Culture to make this film, which immediately after its premiere was awarded the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at Cannes. Cristi Puiu’s film, which would have a major influence on the evolution of national and even international filmmaking, was appreciated first by international film critics. A. O. Scott was one of the most astute supporters of recent Romanian directors and, as he pointed out in his New York Times review (2008), this 2005 film showcases the cinematic components of New Wave stylistics, practicing camera movements and an overall approach to filmmaking that can only be evaluated as a specific mode of representing reality. And even if sometimes the filmmakers themselves denied the existence of a ‘Romanian New Wave’, their productions disclose repetitive artistic formulas, attributes that brought success after success during the last two decades and coalesced into a coherent aesthetics easily identifiable as a recognizable direction in contemporary Romanian and European cinema. As noted by Monica Filimon (2017) in an overview of the director’s work, there is an ethnographic dimension which is specific to Puiu’s approach (Filimon 2017: 63). The Death … is not only developed with the help of an observational camera, it also gives an anthropological account of life in contemporary Bucharest, which gives the entire school of cinema an authentic edge. The director himself acts like an ethnographer, taking viewers from their simple role of witnesses to emotional events, to direct participants, who must make moral decisions as actions unfold in front of them. The main cinematographic modality, previously practiced in Stuff and Dough, is the free camera, liberated from its fixed position, ‘jumping’ from the main character to apparently insignificant details in the middle of dialogue, attributing roles as things happen, recording life in the moment. Comparable with Breathless, the camerawork here seems careless and lacking any aesthetic predisposition, while providing a specific mood, one that is breaking cinema conventions. Another trait disclosed by the production of this film is the drive towards auteurism in Puiu’s works. The director claimed (Corciovescu 2005) that all his films were part of one single cinematic vision, which he identified as “Six Tales from the Outskirts of Bucharest”, a clear hint to Six contes moraux (1962–1972) by Eric Rohmer. Starting with The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, then with Aurora (2010) and most recently with Sieranevada (2016), these feature films are not only placed in the urban universe of the Romanian capital city, but viewers are offered a very personal experience of life and death in Romanian society. Once again, Godard’s shadow is present, as the French director also claimed that cinema is only about recording “death at work”, by capturing the “mortal side of life” (Godard 1997: 62).

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

159

The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu also provides a temporal model for a cinema based on real-life events, as everything takes place in a compressed timeframe. About two and a half hours of film recount a period of about six hours in the life and suffering of an old man living alone in a disorderly apartment and later taken to four different hospitals. This is a narrative strategy, used and reused by many filmmakers, producing the effect of ‘verisimilitude’, that is, the sensation of a close and immediate resemblance to reality. In Romanian New Wave cinema, often things take place in less than 24  hours, here from late Saturday night to early Sunday morning. As the tragedy unfolds in front of the viewer the sensation of real time intensifies the visually and emotionally acute reality. In terms of cinematography the film illustrates the two main features of New Wave stylistics: the realistic effect obtained by the use of handheld camera, and the powerful authenticity generated by location shooting. Throughout the story of Lăzărescu Dante Remus, from his movements in the cramped kitchen to the confinement of the ambulance and then hospital rooms, the camera is always following, jolting with every bump, reacting to every anxiety-inducing change and every new suffering. This preference for capturing real environments, inherited from the neorealist tradition, is amplified by the near-realtime evolution of the plot. As mentioned, these Romanian filmmakers often choose to fictionalize and retell a real event. In 1997 the body of a man, later identified as one Constantin Nica, was found lifeless on a street in Bucharest. The results of a subsequent investigation soon turned into a huge media scandal, as reporters found out that the 58-year-old man had been carried by an ambulance from one hospital to another without being admitted; since he was homeless, the paramedics had abandoned him in front of his former address. The four different doctors who refused him treatment were never prosecuted, and the only convicted person was a nurse on the ambulance, sentenced to jail for negligence. Unfortunately this was not a unique case; in 2018 another man died in front of a hospital following a doctor’s refusal to treat him (Digi24 2018). Puiu’s procedure is not simply to create stories ‘based on real events’; it is relevant that, immediately after the case of Constantin Nica, Cristi Puiu began a documentary project at the Craiova retirement home. Other films also use this practice, such as Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012) which recounts the real-life case of an exorcism practiced by a priest in Moldova—they represent the ‘really-real’ through a personal perspective and a systematic filmmaking elaboration. These techniques of obtaining the most powerful cinematic realism are assisted by the documentary-style reality depicted. This is visible in the setting of the first part of the film, when for more than 50 minutes all action happens in a cramped apartment, the narrative centred on the ordinary life of a solitary old man who lives with three cats. At this level it seems to be a film where nothing happens, yet this purposeful emptiness of action and of meaning allows the naturalistic approach to develop. The intention of the director becomes evident in the very first scene, which later becomes a standard for many more Romanian films. A banal urban space (either

160 

D. POP

an apartment, a kitchen or a bathroom) becomes the setting for a significant human dilemma. While Mr. Lăzărescu is alone, and the entire scene apparently depicts his menial activities in a pseudo-documentary mode, the film accumulates realistic engagement, finally producing an overwhelming realistic ‘mood’. The fact that the film is entirely made by using the principle of location shooting, with the apartment, hospitals and even the ambulance used being authentic, gives Puiu, just as in the case of his neorealist predecessors, an eyewitness quality. This realism is amplified by a naturalistic dimension; we see the sickly old man vomiting his medicine, washing his shirt by hand in the bathroom sink, then finally getting ready for his operation, washed by the nurses at the hospital (see Fig. 9.1). All these elements might seem to lead to the conclusion that this is a simple form of storytelling and even could justify the label of minimalism. With Lăzărescu taken from hospital to hospital during a couple of hours during the night, then finally prepared for brain surgery, the structure of the narrative is linear and even classical. There is a continuous development of the plot, with three acts and a climax, then a denouement that seems to close everything. A typical device of Romanian cinematic storytelling is its narrative ambiguity, coupled with complex references hidden in plain sight. This is similar to what Geneviève Sellier describes as “new wave” plots or the “ideology of

Fig. 9.1  Mr. Lăzărescu’s bedroom provides a naturalistic mise en scène where authenticity accentuates the cinematographic realism. (Courtesy of Mandragora)

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

161

ambiguity” (Sellier 2008: 129). The very title of the film fits this strategy, even to the extent of some hasty film critics concluding that Mr. Lăzărescu dies at the end. In fact, Puiu gives no clues in this direction; the old man is never shown dead, nor do we receive any indication through the storytelling to prove this hypothesis. Moreover, the doctors diagnose his brain problem as a routine operation. Just as in many other films of this generation, the uncertainty becomes a driving element. While the title creates false expectations for the viewer, since this is only a ‘chronicle of a death foretold’, never finished with an actual death, multiple other elements function as ‘red herrings’. Lăzărescu’s entire character development is constructed from ambiguities, as we gradually discover various aspects of the life of this decrepit pensioner; we realize that he is more than meets the eye, as he was at some point in his life an educated man. Indeed, the title could have been “The Life of Mr. Lăzărescu” as we reconstruct, from pieces, a life while watching the man himself gradually degrading. Such ambiguities also allow for interpenetrations and symbolic interpretations; for example, some authors (Batori 2018) see in the striped pyjamas worn by Mr. Lăzărescu the typical clothing of detainees in Romania, which suggests references to the concepts advanced by Foucault, and the defining of this urban environment as ‘carceral’. Others read in the fact that the name of the nurse is Mioara a reference to the fundamental myth of Romanian, the Miorit ̦a, where death is celebrated as a passage to another world. Indeed, Lăzărescu goes through the various levels of the Inferno, and his middle name (Dante) and surname (with its reference to Lazarus) are direct indications of the subtle insinuations inserted in the film. Other significations can be coupled with this ironical treatment, such as at the end, where Virgil (also the name of the brother-in-law at the beginning) is the hospital porter who takes the patient to doctor Anghel, at the ‘top floor’. Such counter-narrative tools also perform at a deeper level, like the fact that the story is driven by an anti-hero, even a fundamentally non-heroic individual. Mr. Lăzărescu is a flawed character, a drunken and incapable old man, in a negative mirroring of typical characterdriven narratives (Fig. 9.2). Although metaphorical interventions are refused by Puiu, there are overt forms of symbolism. Puiu’s training as a painter and his artistic background often influence his aesthetic arrangements, providing intermedial references like the re-enactment of the Pietà in a scene with Mr. Lăzărescu’s neighbours, or Mantegna’s classical Lamentation of Christ staged during a medical visit. While this allowed many critics to label Puiu’s works as ‘art film’, the Romanian director acts more like a media critic, making indirect references to several film genres, most visibly here to the ‘emergency room drama’. Like his Nouvelle Vague predecessors, Puiu and his colleagues often take on American classical genres, re-articulating them in a sarcastic or even dismissive way. Dismantling the inner workings of cinematic and narrative canons remains a trait of the New Wave cinema, and in particular for Puiu’s approach. Irony and sarcasm are also used for social innuendo. “It’s a mortality problem”, says Mr. Lăzărescu, as the director purposefully plays with the words

162 

D. POP

Fig. 9.2  This ‘everyday life’ narrative is driven by the anti-heroic nature of Mr. Lăzărescu and his apparent lack of traits allows a criticism of large representation paradigms. (Courtesy of Mandragora)

morality and mortality. Throughout the film several moral decisions are made and unmade: the nurse asks a neighbouring family to help her hospitalize him, but they refuse; in the hospital she wants to abandon him, activating her own chain of interventions; multiple private negotiations take place, and small compromises are made, but the director never judges and never takes sides. The typical formula—real time, real events, real people, real locations and realistic camerawork—has one final Romanian twist, in the absurdist dimensions of this reality. In this specific version of realism, the dialogues, interactions and situations are very often at the fringe between the believable and the inconceivable, trapped between dark laughter and utter tragedy. The end of The Death …, which opens with an ironic extra-diegetic musical intervention from Margareta Pîslaru, one of the popular singers of communist Romania, who sings about love, is also punctuated with a song, this time about the evening coming over the seas. A similar technique is used by Mungiu, at the end of 4 Months … where another song about love is placed at the heart of a tragedy. This particular combination of darkness and lightness, of laughter and suffering, remains a trademark of Romanian films. Last but not least it is significant that The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, nominated as the fifth ‘Best Film of the 21st Century’, Romania’s official submission to the 78th Academy Awards, and awarded the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

163

Cannes was never a box office success in Romania. It grossed about US $70,000  in ticket sales, with 25,000 viewers at home. Considering that the total budget of the film was estimated at about US $500,000, clearly the return cannot be seen in terms of financial value, but in a cultural and aesthetic sense. As Jaffe noted, while references can be made to the effects of the communist past, and even to Fascist totalitarianism (Jaffe 2014: 92), this is not only a story about the Romanian medical system or the history of one particular society, but also about humanity and its limitations.

Conclusion As noted by Stojanova and Duma (2012: 8–9), the conceptual nature of the New Wave Romanian cinema is elusive, and the dispute between film theorists using the concept of ‘New Romanian Cinema’, with the acronym NCR (‘noul cinema românesc’), and the New Wave seems insoluble. However, this endless disagreement around definitions and terminologies is not specific to Romanian film criticism. For example, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith places the films made by the Italian neorealists and the French Nouvelle Vague in the “new cinemas” category, defining them as “movements” that can be labelled through their novelty (Nowell-Smith 2013: 150–164). Even if in the case of the Romanian contemporary filmmakers the novelty is even less obvious, the conceptual bias remains. Some Romanian critics freely use both terms, “new wave” and “new cinema” interchangeably (Corciovescu and Mihăilescu  2011) and even Alex Leo Șerban, one of the most important critics and perhaps the first to recognize the value of these productions, hesitated when using the terms, considering that the “so-called new wave” was in fact a form of neorealism (Șerban 2009: 55). Șerban’s less knowledgeable disciples continued to promote the NCR formula, without taking into consideration that the concept of ‘new cinemas’ was terminologically linked in film theory with the Third World political cinema. Although the Cinema Novo of Brazil shared several elements of the European New Waves, among them the documentary approach to reality and the authenticity of narratives, these films were politically charged. Another problem is taxonomical, with many critics aggregating together all the post-2000 productions into a single direction. Others, like Dominique Nasta (2013), followed by foreign authors such as László Strausz (2017), deal with Romanian filmmaking by bringing together directors from the 1960s and 1970s (like Pintilie or Daneliuc), with those from the 1990s (Caranfil) and those after 2000 (Puiu or Mungiu). In the specific case of the Romanian film industry, a New Wave school was not developed during communism because of the political and historical situation of the country. While in other Central and Eastern European cinemas, the influences of the French Nouvelle Vague immediately reverberated in films made by auteurs like Wajda, Polanski or Milos Forman, in Romania New Wave experiments remained isolated at the time.

164 

D. POP

Romanian New Wave cinema is limited by aesthetic and cinematic criteria. Only a handful of films, from more than 180 productions made during the last decades qualify in this direction. Using the term ‘Romanian New Wave’ is an acknowledgement that several of the films made after 2000 are following a coherent aesthetic, that a group of filmmakers belongs to a commonly established canon and have developed similar narrative and representational strategies. The fundamental questions are juxtaposed with the problem of defining the Romanian New Wave as a distinct style and even a cinematic sub-genre. Is it a distinct movement or is it simply a collection of filmmaking modalities? While accepting the difficulty of defining a single ‘film school’, as there is no common ‘dogma’, there are at least three main practices of the New Wave cinemas that recur in the Romanian New Wave: stylistic realism, aesthetic essentialism and thematic authenticity. The stylistic dimensions deal with camerawork, mise en scène and editing, where handheld camera, on-location sound and lighting and the long-shot philosophy are coupled with editing practices which prioritize non-intervention. The New Wave is a direction in Romanian cinema based on the aesthetic effort to present a ‘slice of life’, which is a central quality of this mode of making cinema. Last but not least, each filmmaker of this generation found inspiration in the films of his colleagues and in Romanian reality, coalescing into a single identity.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Can you describe the common elements of the various European New Waves, and how they explicate a continental philosophy of cinema? How do they display characteristics which can be seen as opposing Hollywood or commercial films? 2. Can you identify any common stylistics and/or aesthetic, and any recurrent narrative components across: Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague, the Danish Dogme movement and the Romanian New Wave? 3. Discuss the cinematographic elements that constitute the European filmmaking tradition. What do you believe these are? 4. Which are the main elements that support the idea of a coherent and specific Romanian New Wave mode of cinema-making?

References Aitken, Ian. 2007. The European Realist Tradition. Studies in European Cinema 3 (3): 175–188. Andreescu, Florentina C. 2013. From Communism to Capitalism: Nation and State in Romanian Cultural Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Film in the Aura of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barthes, Roland. 2010. The Rustle of Language, Trans. Richard Howard. California Paperback Print. [Nachdr.]. Berkeley: University of California Press. Batori, Anna. 2018. Space in Romanian and Hungarian Cinema. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

9  THE LATEST EUROPEAN NEW WAVE: CINEMATIC REALISM AND EVERYDAY… 

165

BBC Culture Poll. 2018. The 100 Greatest Foreign Language Films. http://www.bbc. com/culture/story/20181029-the-100-greatest-foreign-language-films. Accessed 10 May 2019. Căliman, Călin. 2007. The New Waves of Romanian Cinema. Kinokultura, Special Edition Online http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/6/caliman.shtml. Accessed 10 December 2018. Corciovescu, Cristina. 2005. De vorbă cu Cristi Puiu despre “Lăzărescu” s¸i nu numai. http://aarc.ro/articol/de-vorba-cu-cristi-puiu-despre-lazarescu-si-nu-numai. Accessed 10 December 2018. Corciovescu, Cristina, and Magda Mihăilescu, eds. 2011. Noul Cinema Românesc: De La Tovarăsu ̦ l Ceaușescu La Domnul Lăzărescu: 10 Abordări Critice. Ias¸i: Polirom. Council of Europe Resolution 88 (15) Setting up a European Support Fund for the Co-production and Distribution of Creative Cinematographic and Audiovisual Works («Eurimages»). 1988. https://rm.coe.int/setting-up-a-european-support-fund-forthe-co-production-and-distribut/16804b86e2. Accessed 10 December 2018. Dargis, Manohla, and Scott, Andrew O. 2017. The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far. New York Times, June 9. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/09/ movies/the-25-best-films-of-the-21st-centur y.html?searchResultPosition=4 Accessed 9 April 2020. Digi24. 2018. Pacient lăsat să moară peste drum de spital. July 13. https://www. digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/sanatate/pacient-lasat-sa-moarta-peste-drum-de-spitalmedic-nu-am-voie-sa-parasesc-spitalul-962895. Accessed 10 December 2018. Dinescu, Lucia Simona. 2014. Noul film românesc: un eseu de antropologie vizuală. București: Editura Universităt ̦ii din București. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Everett, Wendy E. 2005. Introduction: European Film and the Quest for Identity. In European Identity in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett, 2nd ed., 7–14. Bristol: Intellect Books. Ezra, Elizabeth. 2004. European Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferencz-Flatz, Christian. 2015. Incursiuni fenomenologice în noul film românesc. Colect ̦ia Cinemag: Cluj-Napoca: Tact. Filimon, Monica. 2017. Cristi Puiu. Contemporary Film Directors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fulger, Mihai. 2011. Despre moarte, numai de bine. In Noul cinema românesc: De la tovarăsu ̦ l Ceaușescu la domnul Lăzărescu, ed. Cristina Corciovescu, 105–128. Iași: Polirom. Galt, Rosalind. 2006. The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map. New  York: Columbia University Press. Giroud, Françoise. 1958. Le Nouvelle Vague: Portraits De La Jeunesse. L’air Du Temps. Paris: Gallimard. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1997. From Critic to Film-Maker: Godard in Interview. In Cahiers Du Cinéma. Vol. 2, 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-Evaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier and David Wilson, 59–67. London: Routledge. Gorzo, Andrei. 2012. Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel: Un mod de a gândi cinemaul de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu. București: Humanitas. Goss, Brian Michael. 2015. Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007) and Beyond the Hills (2012): Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu and the paradoxes of ‘antinational national cinema’. Journal of European Popular Culture 6: 44–45.

166 

D. POP

Hjort, Mette, and Duncan J. Petrie. 2007. The Cinema of Small Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Imre, Anikó. 2012. Introduction: Eastern European Cinema from No End to the End (As We Know It). In A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre, 1–23. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Jaffe, Ira. 2014. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action. New  York: Wallflower Press. Light, Andrew, and Jonathan M. Smith. 2005. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Marie, Michel. 2003. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Martin, Sean. 2013. New Waves in Cinema. Harpenden: Kamera Books. Mihăilescu, Călin-Andrei. 2012. In the Country of Panpan: Romanian Dark Fun Cinema in and Out of Focus. In European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition, ed. Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl. Transcript: Bielefeld. Mungiu, Cristian. 2016. Interview Agerpress. https://www.agerpres.ro/cultura/2016/06/30/mungiu-daca-as-fi-vrut-sa-fac-film-uitandu-ma-la-incasari-internationale-as-fi-facut-de-mult-film-in-alta-limba-11-24-30. Accessed 10 December 2018. Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. New York: Wallflower Press. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 2013. Making Waves. New Cinemas of the 1960s. (Rev. ed.) London: Continuum Publishing. Pop, Doru. 2010. The Grammar of the New Romanian Cinema. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae 3: 19–40. ———. 2014. Romanian New Wave Cinema, An Introduction. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Rivi, Luisa. 2007. European Cinema After 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, Andrew O. 2008. In Film, the Romanian New Wave Has Arrived. New York Times, January 19. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/arts/19iht-fromanian.1.9340722.html. Accessed 10 December 2018. Sellier, Geneviève. 2008. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Șerban, Alex Leo. 2009. 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc. Iași: Polirom. Stănescu, Alex. 2016. Noul val românesc și dreptul spectatorilor la fericire (I). September 2. https://paseist.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/noul-val-romanesc-si-dreptulspectatorilor-la-fericire/. Accessed 10 May 2019. Stojanova, Christina, and Dana Duma. 2012. The New Romanian Cinema: Between the Tragic and the Ironic. Film International 10 (1): 7–21. Strausz, László. 2017. Hesitant Histories on the Romanian Screen. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Țut ̦ui, Marian. 2012. Surfing on the Romanian New Wave. Film International 10 (1): 23–32. Van Sant, Gus, and Mario Falsetto. 2015. Conversations with Gus Van Sant. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. White, John. 2017. European Art Cinema. Routledge Film Guidebooks. Abingdon, OX: Routledge.

CHAPTER 10

Between Transnational and Local in European Cinema: Regional Resemblances in Hungarian and Romanian Films Andrea Virginás

Definitions Post-Communist/Post-Communism The post-communist era in Eastern Europe followed the regime changes of 1989–1990, results of more peaceful (Czechoslovakia, Hungary) or bloody revolutions (Romania) that put an end to communist dictatorships—disregarding basic human rights (decent living conditions, freedom of movement and speech) and effective thanks to secret service surveillance—in the region. The latter developed following the Treaty of Yalta (1945), when Europe was divided into capitalist Western Europe, under the influence of the USA, and communist Eastern Europe, under the influence of the Soviet Union. Parallel Industries Such film production systems are found where one parallel industry “is small and both locally focused and anchored”, with “the other (…) externally owned and run, and in every way part of the global film industry”, write Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (2007: 18) following from the work of film

A. Virginás (*) Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_10

167

168 

A. VIRGINÁS

historian Dina Iordanova. These parallel industries currently exist in such different small national cinemas as the Danish or Hungarian ones, disseminating global know-­how to local film production personnel. Runaway Production Film and television creations (or phases of production) are displaced from Hollywood studios to cheaper or perhaps more spectacular locations abroad, in order to employ foreign and cheaper skilled workforce, and/or with the aim of profiting from business possibilities offered by national film production laws outside the USA. Hjort and Petrie (2007: 9), referring to Toby Miller’s work, call this a “new order (…) founded on an intensification of Hollywood’s direct participation in the production sectors of other national film industries”, in many cases small national cinemas. Arthouse Cinema Films historically created in European film industries were more attached to literary, theatrical and artistic traditions, counterpointing classical Hollywood storytelling’s linear causality and hero-centredness with episodic or eventless narratives and wandering heroes missing concrete aims. In the USA these films were projected in arthouse cinemas, as opposed to blockbusters screened in multiplex cinemas (Elsaesser 2005: 23). The 1969 Cuban manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema” names arthouse cinema Second Cinema, with Hollywood being First Cinema (Hayward 2001: 389). Post-Analogue The analogue technologies of recording, archiving and distribution dominated the twentieth century: celluloid film strips, gramophone discs and video cassettes share the non-digital mode of keeping track of information, by way of analogue imprinting or projection. Since the 1980s–1990s, post-analogue (digital) technologies are based on digital coding, which allows for almost infinitely more information to be recorded via digital cameras, or archived and redistributed throughout digital streaming services.

Introduction Regional nodes of film production and film culture, usually constituted on zones of cultural overlapping between different linguistic cultures, have been ever-present in European film. These may emerge from the hybridization of major national film cultures, or come into being through the co-working and necessary interdependence of small- to medium-sized national film industries (Hjort and Petrie 2007; Giukin et al. 2015), or indeed may be exemplified by such “regional cinemas or national cinemas whose culture and/or language

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

169

take their distance from the nation states which enclose them” (Crofts 2006: 45). A few recent examples are Cinema Beur in 1980s France, the English– Scottish film renaissance in the 1990s, Swedish–Danish television series and films or the Slovak–Czech film co-productions of the 2000s. These phenomena are moments of what Stephen Crofts envisages as the nation-state “manifestly losing its sovereignty (…) pressured both by transnational forces—canonically American in economic and cultural spheres, and Japanese in economic and, more recently, cultural spheres—and simultaneously the sub-national, sometimes called the local” (Crofts 2006: 54). Thomas Elsaesser also draws attention to the fact that “it is location that makes European cinema perhaps not unique but nonetheless distinctive. In particular, cities and regions have superseded auteurs and nations as focal points for film production” (Elsaesser 2005: 26). The division between differently sized European film industries capable of co-working and co-influencing each other circumscribes a meso-level analysis of the European film cultural processes, a direction possibly different from simply cataloguing the consequences of a sheer erosion of the nation-state. This meso-level direction of analysis focuses on the characteristics and functioning principles of these trans- and intercultural, co-working regional film canons and cinema hubs, with a conscious reaction to Hollywood dominance also detectable in the films’ texture. Eastern European film is identifiable as a transnational and regional film canon even in terms of name, with the region’s film industries comprised overwhelmingly of small national cinemas according to Hjort and Petrie’s categorization (2007). In order to highlight recent directions in European film culture, this chapter examines the regional aspect of Eastern European cinema by focusing on two of its small- to medium-sized industries, while presenting a comparative analysis of two films, one from each industry, as examining one film would not allow for the clear emergence of comparative and regional aspects. Hungarian and Romanian films constitute two such post-communist Eastern European national industries that are geographical neighbours. Additionally, through the border region of Transylvania and its mixed, occasionally bilingual Hungarian and Romanian population, they dispose of an area of cultural overlap. As there is no regional co-production platform (e.g. similar to the Nordic Film and TV Fund, catering for Scandinavian countries), this cultural overlap is manifested through the frequent individual collaboration of Hungarian and Romanian film professionals and often mediated by creators of Transylvanian origin. To focus on the two Case Study films with the aim of demonstrating the regional resemblances mentioned in the title: in Hungarian László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015), the titular Saul Ausländer’s concentration camp mate Abraham Warszawski is played by Transylvanian actor Levente Molnár, in whose capacity as a casting agent he is given special thanks at the end of Romanian Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015), in the editorial department of which we find renowned Hungarian professional, László Kovács, working as a telecine dailies colourist, that film being a co-production between Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and France.

170 

A. VIRGINÁS

Hungarian and Romanian film cultures in the twenty-first century offer a fertile ground of regional linkages and synchronicities, and in the first section their comparable and/or common traits will emerge through their inclusion in the small cinema models. Based on estimated lists of the, respectively, most-­ viewed Hungarian and Romanian films of the twenty-first century, “small (national) domestic taste” in an Eastern European context (Virginás 2016) will be sketched. In the second section the argument is advanced that increasing domestic audience numbers in the second part of the 2010s are also due to incorporating ‘Hollywood formulas’ in small national production, aesthetic and distribution strategies, to which Eastern European small national domestic audiences, attuned to Hollywood-type stylistics, react in a positive manner. Finally, and in order to demonstrate the often evident, and thus unnoticed similarities that suggest a regional filmic node—seen here as an important new direction of development in contemporary European cinema—the two previously mentioned films will be analysed in the Case Study section. The Hungarian Son of Saul and Romanian Aferim! not only each gathered the highest respective domestic audience numbers of 2015, but have been recognized internationally—Son of Saul was awarded the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, and Aferim! won the 2015 Silver Berlin Bear. Small national characteristics, European allegiances and Hollywood influences are at work simultaneously in the two films, suggesting a process based on a meso-­level forging of apparently disparate characteristics: “small cinemas today are somewhere in between the spaces of Hollywood and other spaces in their impact on the audiences and the production of new modernisms in cinema” (Falkowska and Giukin 2015: xxvi).

Small National Numbers Hungarian and Romanian film history can be delimited into pre-communist (before 1945/1948), communist (1948/1945–1989) and post-communist (since 1989/1990) eras. This historical and political meta-narrative gains specificity through being complemented by the numeric assessment postulated by the small cinemas model, which is not a normative one, allowing for a considerable fluctuation of the values: Hjort and Petrie (2007) highlight that it is the combination of these aspects, as well as the comparative perspective, that needs to govern examinations (Table 10.1). Small national cinemas are described as originating from smaller nation-­ states in terms of number of inhabitants and size of territory, with a generally low gross national product (GNP) per capita, and the historically formative experience of being dominated by non-nationals (Hjort and Petrie 2007). Hungarian cinema fits Hjort and Petrie’s categorization based on the four variables of territory (93,000 square kilometres), inhabitants (9,880,000), gross national income (GNI) per capita (~US $12,000 throughout the 2010s) and experience of incorporation into larger structures—the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Soviet Union and the European Union (EU)—to the degree

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

171

Table 10.1  The model of small national cinemas Country

Population (mil)

Area (km2)

GNI per capita (USD)

Historical background

Model countries according to Hjort-Petrie Hungary Romania

4–10

˂273,000

1200–60,000

Colonial, Imperial

9.9 21.5

93,000 237,491

~12,000 ~10,850

Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Eastern/ Soviet Bloc, EU

Source: The CIA World Factbook and the World Bank country sheets of Hungary and Romania

that it may be even considered a typical small national cinema. Romania, on the other hand, in terms of its population (~20 million) and area (237,500 square kilometres) is in the upper margins of a small national cinema according to Hjort and Petrie, similar to Taiwan or Burkina Faso (2007: 6). Still, in terms of its recent GNI per capita (~US $8000 in the period 2008–2012, comparable to Bulgarian or Tunisian data as presented by Hjort and Petrie, and around US $10,000 for estimated post-2015 values), and its long history as part of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy or the Eastern Bloc, and more recently the EU, it indeed should be included in this type of cinema (see Virginás 2014). Involvement in the pan-national framework of the European Union has influenced domestic production of films in both cases. In the second five-year periods following their accessions to the EU (in 2004 and 2007, respectively), the number of films produced/in production in Hungary decreased by 50–60% (to a hypothetical average of 15 productions a year), while in Romania a dramatic increase of 350% was registered (to a hypothetical average of 50 productions a year) (Virginás 2016). These processes not only correlate with the dimensions of the respective national markets but also reflect the trends of stagnating (Hungary) or increasing (Romania) GNI per capita amounts. Thus situating both film industries in the framework of small national cinemas makes them comparable and highlights their need of connection as members of various Pan-European political entities during the twentieth century, since “in Europe, the traditional sense of bounded and differentiated national cinemas has always been more difficult to maintain in the case of small nations” (Hjort and Petrie 2007: 16). Concerning domestic audiences for domestic films, data from the 2005 to 2015 period shows that a hypothetical average audience for a Hungarian or Romanian feature film might be somewhere between 5000 and 30,000 viewers for a whole screening period. The two following tables show the most popular domestic films and their audiences in both markets in the period 2010–2015. The most popular Hungarian films surpass 100,000 viewers on average (Table 10.2):

172 

A. VIRGINÁS

Table 10.2  Top five Hungarian films in terms of audience numbers in the early 2010s Title

Director

Audience

Coming Out (2013) Liza, the Fox-Fairy (2015) Argo 2 (2015) What Ever Happened to Timi? (2014) Son of Saul (2015)

Dénes Orosz Károly Ujj Mészáros Attila Árpa Attila Herczeg László Nemes Jeles

141,760 105,433 105,049 104,863 ~90,000a

Source: Data synthesized by the author, based on national film audience data presented by the Nemzeti Filmiroda (The National Film Office in Hungary), the Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap (The Hungarian National Film Fund) and the Est.hu cultural programme portal’s weekly box-office data up to 11 November 2015 Total number amounted to 180,000 viewers

a

Table 10.3  Top five Romanian films in terms of audience numbers in the early 2010s

Title

Director

Audience

Child’s Pose (2013) Selfie (2014) Aferim! (2015) Of Snails and Men (2012) Why Me? (2015)

Călin Peter Netzer Cristina Iacob Radu Jude Tudor Giurgiu Tudor Giurgiu

118,422 102,026 76,622 61,264 58,423

Source: Data synthesized by the author, based on national film audience data presented by the Centrul National al Cinematografiei and the Cinemagia cultural portal’s weekly box-office data up to 16 November 2015

Meanwhile in the Romanian market, twice bigger, the threshold that the domestic films must surpass to enter the ‘most popular’ list is half as small: around 50,000 viewers for a successful domestic film. In the top 20 most-­ viewed Romanian films presented in the Centrul Nat ̦ional al Cinematografiei (National Film Centre) statistics for the 2009–2013 period show six films garnering more than 50,000 viewers, and for the 2014–2015 period two more examples may be added (Table 10.3). During the years 2016–2017, film-related press in both countries was overwhelmed by a seemingly unexpected phenomenon: cinema audience numbers started to grow, primarily in Romania,1 and audience numbers for the most popular domestic films scored higher than ever in the twenty-first century in both countries. The following two tables summarize the numbers for the most popular Hungarian and Romanian films of 2016 and 2017, with 400,000 and 120,000 viewers, respectively; real ‘blockbuster’ numbers for a domestic film from either country (Tables 10.4 and 10.5). Thus the current numbers give us a clearer picture of these two Eastern European small national markets that are also transnationally positioned, thanks to the European Union founding and supporting schemes in the film industry. Their coagulating into a regional hub of similarities not only in terms of ­production and audience numbers but also in terms of stylistics and poetics is

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

173

Table 10.4  Hungarian box-office growth: audience numbers of the most-viewed domestic releases for 2016–20172 Title

Director

Audience

Bet on Revenge (2017) Pappa Pia (2017) On Body and Soul (2017) Brazilians (2017) Strangled (2016) It’s Not the Time of My Life (2016)

Gábor Herendi Gábor Csupó Ildikó Enyedi Gábor Rohonyi Árpád Sopsits Szabolcs Hajdu

434,737 163,185 138,000 73,794 40,417 31,470

Source: Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap 2015

Table 10.5 Romanian box-office growth: audience numbers of the most-­viewed domestic releases for 20163

Title

Director

Audience

Two Lottery Tickets (2016) #Selfie 69 (2016) Graduation (2016) Dogs (2016) Sieranevada (2016) Illegitimate (2016)

Paul Negoescu 127,513 Cristina Iacob 133,207 Cristian Mungiu 54,444 Bogdan Mirica 21,186 Cristi Puiu 30,217 Adrian Sitaru 10,852

Source: Centrul National al Cinematografiei, Blaga (2019)

evidently traceable to small national, but also to European specificities and to Hollywood influences too, to be presented in detail in the next section.

Small National Taste While arguing for their common embeddedness in European arthouse film traditions, it is also evident that the most-viewed Hungarian and Romanian films of the 2010s have also been influenced by Hollywood templates in both production—present already in the pre-communist era—and storytelling, conditioned by the preponderance of Hollywood films in domestic markets. European arthouse cinema in general has been explicitly positioned as situated the farthest possible from Hollywood-produced, globally distributed mainstream cinema relying on genres: “this more or less virulent, often emotionally charged opposition between Europe and Hollywood exerts a gravitational pull on all forms of filmmaking in Europe (…)”, observes Thomas Elsaesser (2005: 16). Such a standpoint is evidently upheld by the central canonical formations of both Hungarian and Romanian small national cinemas in contemporary Europe. The centrality of auteur-driven, festival-circuit arthouse cinema has been a norm accepted by Eastern European small national funding establishments and critical discourses too, especially since the communist era, in both film ­industries

174 

A. VIRGINÁS

under scrutiny. This characteristic might be linked to the need to differentiate small national film production from globalized mainstream filmmaking via arthouse labelling (Neale 2002), and it is clearly a consequence of the limited resources available to small national filmmakers too. These limits become even more striking if we compare them to major national (Polish, French or British) or global film production contexts (Hollywood or Bollywood), which are capable of producing commercially viable genre films on a regular basis. Ioana Uricaru’s observations referring to post-communist Romania are pertinent: “a country with dwindling audiences, with an incredibly low number of theatres, and basically with no film industry in the sense of a commercially viable enterprise” (Uricaru 2012: 428). Moreover, the commercial film genre awareness of contemporary Eastern European/Hungarian and Romanian filmmakers and audiences has a specific profile: it was deeply influenced by the cultural memory of market-oriented pre-communist genre films (especially in Hungary), also fundamentally formed by communist-era genre films explicitly representing political propaganda (in both countries), as well as deeply impacted by the disproportionate number of Hollywood films which ‘invaded’ Eastern European film and television screens after 1989. The repercussions last to this day as far as the dominant ideology of arthouse authorship (supported by the small national states) and the non-­ acceptance/acceptance of commercial, market-oriented, popular film is concerned. One could cite multiple opinions, scholarly and otherwise, to support such a generalization, such as the following interviews with Hungarian and Romanian film professionals. Hungarian cameraman Mátyás Erdély, responsible for Son of Saul, exemplifies ‘Hollywood’ in terms of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) or Michael Bay’s Transformers series (2007–), characterizing it as “superficial”, “not true/faithful/fictionalizing”, “down one level”, “lacking in sensitivity”, the Other (Bujdosó 2015). Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, premiering Graduation (2016), expresses a more nuanced view on arthouse film’s opposition to “commercial cinema”, with the latter positioned as something secondary: “I think what counts in the case of every film or story is the result, or to simplify: it is wonderful if you succeed to blow my mind and make me think without using the tropes of commercial cinema, but if you only try to avoid them without any inspired result, then, I think you had better use those [commercial tropes]” (Vasiliu 2016). Finally, a definite opposition between the aesthetic philosophy of Romanian New Wave/arthouse cinema and American/ Hollywood cinema is explicitly formulated in an interview with Romanian director Cristi Puiu: If you want to stick to the situations of life, they are very unpredictable. And you just have to be aware of this fact, and stay awake, and push the red button to record it. You don’t need to invent metaphors or visuals of huge proportions. I don’t need to make Lord of the Rings 5 in order to tell my story. (…). The whole process of working on a film is dependent on the situations of life.

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

175

I remember talking to a couple of other Romanian directors who were a little frustrated because their movies were received better abroad than at home. How do you feel about that? (…) The perception that Romanian audiences are having about the films we are making is not a gentle one. I mean, for a large audience, cinema is American cinema. (Rapold 2016)

Puiu’s observation that “for a large audience, cinema is American cinema” is much more than a personal opinion. Save for the communist period (1945–1990), when First and Second World oppositions generated the concepts of First/ Hollywood and Second/European Cinemas (Hayward 2001: 389), a strong Hollywood influence has been exercised in the Eastern European region. In the pre-communist era this happened by modelling production (e.g. in Hungary, and in the German/Czech industries) on the classical studio system of the ‘Dream Factory’, which, obviously, resulted in similar outcomes in film poetics, with a high number of comedies and melodramas produced (Vajdovich 2009; Varga 2009). However, while the Hungarian cinema industry had the chance to know market-oriented, studio-based ‘Hollywood-style’ filmmaking before the communist era, the Romanian film industry had this possibility to a very limited degree, disposing of less capital and a lower level of institutionalization (Dumitrescu 2005). Thus the communist-era suspicion concerning ‘Hollywood-style’ filmmaking in Hungary or, on the contrary, the Romanian adaptation of wider-target studio filmmaking in the communist era—which “had the appearance of a real industry” with studios, stars and genres (Uricaru 2012: 430)—created slightly different situations in post-­communist Hungary and Romania, respectively. Focusing on connections between Eastern Europe and Hollywood in the post-communist period, we witness the emergence of what Dina Iordanova names “parallel industries”—a small and locally focused industry co-existing with a formation that is “externally owned and run, and in every way part of the global film industry” (Hjort and Petrie 2007: 18)—a characteristic present in small national cinemas too. This process has enabled direct professional knowledge exchange in the context of runaway Hollywood and HBO productions: for example, the Hollywood super-production Cold Mountain (2003) shot in Romania’s Media Pro Studios, the Game of Thrones (2011–2019) television series partly shot in Croatia, more recently Blade Runner 2049 (2017) produced in Hungary’s Korda Studios, and unexpected horror hit The Nun (2017) shot in the Romanian Castel Film Studio. Therefore, the production experiences of local filmmakers in outsourced A-list Hollywood productions in Hungary, or in the production of outsourced global television films in Romania, must not be ignored as decisive factors in forming contemporary ‘small national taste’. Finally, besides Hollywood’s influence through participation in so-called runaway productions outsourced into this region, its presence in Eastern Europe as the producer of films distributed in cinemas and on digital platforms must be mentioned. Even if arthouse creations have been, sometimes ­exclusively, preferred by national/state and transnational/EU funding agencies, and been awarded in transnational festival contexts and thus symbolically

176 

A. VIRGINÁS

recognized, in these post-communist small national cinema environments audience numbers and box-office numbers are dominated by Hollywood-type and/or -origin, globally distributed spectacular mainstream cinema. As Anikó Imre observes: “From the ruins of state-run film industries, cash-strapped Eastern Europe has emerged as an indispensable site for this transnational rearrangement: a cheap resource for production and a new consumer market (…)” (Imre 2012: 3). From, respectively, the decreasing number of Hungarian films, and increasing number of Romanian films produced within the transnational framework of the EU in 2015  in both countries, it was a historical film that gathered the highest audience numbers in each: Son of Saul in Hungary, with nearly 180,000 domestic viewers, and Aferim! in Romania, with more than 70,000 domestic viewers, both films being instant successes in their domestic opening weeks. However, this is how the weekly audience/box-office top lists looked in Hungary and Romania, respectively, in the opening weeks of the two films (Tables 10.6 and 10.7). Table 10.6  Aferim! premier week in Romanian cinemas (9–15 March 2015) Film title Run All Night Focus The Cobbler Aferim! Chappie The Loft The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water Jupiter Ascending Kingsman: The Secret Service

Weekly audience 27,206 33,791 16,620 20,039 18,905 14,703 5223 4411 4120

Weekly box office (USD) 124,456 ~123,000 76,123 61,269 ~78,000 ~65,000 ~23,000 ~22,000 ~18,000

Cumulative box office (USD) 124,456 627,309 76,123 61,269 190,775 145,195 475,451 809,418 282,639

Source: weekly box-office data of Cinemagia

Table 10.7  Son of Saul premier week in Hungarian cinemas (11–17 June 2015) Film title

Weekly audience

Weekly box office (HUF)

Cumulative box office (HUF)

Jurassic World 3D Spy Son of Saul San Andreas 3D Mad Max: Fury Road 3D Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? Tomorrowland Avengers: Age of Ultron 3D Poltergeist 3D

169,410 45,224 19,913 13,375 9120 6318 6612 5861 5494

244,955,208 60,080,720 23,571,407 19,484,975 13,524,140 8,734,295 8,459,260 8,288,755 8,045,470

255,647,563 139,037,900 28,606,207 53,766,928 215,241,893 30,670,437 54,226,835 539,374,772 40,817,435

Source: Weekly box-office data of Est.hu

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

177

A tiny domestic success may be registered, in a sea of standard Hollywood viewing, in both of these Eastern European small national cinema markets in the post-communist era. However, besides being overwhelmed, both Hungarian and Romanian cinemas have been also trying to counteract this phenomenon: incorporating ‘Hollywood-style’ features has been a constant trend in the domestically popular films grossing the highest audience numbers in 2010s Hungary and Romania. Nolwenn Mingant suggests that it is the “high-quality production, presence of stars, well-crafted scripts, state-of-the-­ art special effects” (Mingant 2011: 145) in Hollywood productions that European, and consequently Hungarian and/or Romanian audiences might find attractive. These qualities might be easily identified, for example, in the 2017 summer Hungarian hit, Pappa Pia which surpassed 160,000 domestic viewers. While serialization, ‘state-of-the art special effects’ and a reliance on male domestic stars are strategies present in both Hungarian and Romanian domestic markets, the origins of the source materials differ considerably. The most successful Hungarian films of the 2010s (see Tables 10.2 and 10.4) strive hard to leave behind the stigma of adaptation and remake: all of them are based on original screenplays and have been developed according to the calculated algorithm of the Hungarian National Film Fund, resembling the classical Hollywood formula. Meanwhile the most popular Romanian films of the same period (see Tables 10.3 and 10.5) rely heavily on transmedial adaptations from theatre pieces (Two Lottery Tickets) or television programmes, usually sitcoms (as was the case with the biggest post-communist Romanian hit, Garcea and the People from Oltenia [2002]). A similarity with domestically popular Croatian films adapted from pre-existing literary material may be pointed at Gilić (2015), suggesting a regional Eastern European pattern in creating popular films for domestic markets. The differences, but also the similarities, between these two regionally interdependent small national cinemas can be highlighted if a grid of four variables is projected on the lists of the most viewed domestic films. These variables are based on the following questions relating to the cornerstones of classical Hollywood storytelling,4 and the main features of the Eastern European popular film canon: is the film structured as a Hollywood-style genre film, such as a comedy, or not; is the film oriented towards representing past events or is its timeframe a present one; is the principle of building its diegetic world that of realism/verisimilitude in representation or not; and, finally, is its structural positioning that of an arthouse, or of a commercial production? Comic films dominate in both markets (Coming Out, Liza, the Fox-Fairy, Argo 2, What Ever Happened to Timi in the Hungarian case, Selfie, Aferim!, Of Snails and Men in the Romanian one). Historical social drama films are the second most beloved type in the Hungarian context (Son of Saul), while present-day social (problem) drama occupies the same place in the preference of Romanian audiences (Child’s Pose, Why Me?). Hungarian audiences prize highly those films that have a specific, often non-realistic angle in constructing their comic diegetic realities (Coming Out, Argo 2, What Ever Happened to Timi), or even fictive worlds

178 

A. VIRGINÁS

placed in strange spheres devoid of direct markers of linear temporality (Liza, the Fox-Fairy). Meanwhile Romanian audiences strongly favour conventions which foreground verisimilitude even in comical films (Of Snails and Men), and which, therefore, are judged as compared to the actual present or past historical reality (the case of Aferim!). To sum up and also to refer forward to the last section: while the films present stories and diegetic worlds highly specific to these small national cultures, European arthouse poetics are employed, combined with a constant attention to and re-coding of Hollywood-type film genre approaches, motivated by the multiple Hollywood influences exercised over Eastern Europe. In pursuing this direction of analysis, the argument of Thomas Elsaesser has been a guiding principle, “an argument that reverses the usual claim that Hollywood hegemony stifles national cinema, by maintaining that Hollywood’s strong global market position is in fact the necessary condition for local or national diversity” (Elsaesser 2005: 17). A small-scale demonstration of this follows in the Case Study section.

Case Study: Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) and Aferim! (Radu Jude, 2015) The respective domestic popularity of Son of Saul and Aferim! signals the centrality of arthouse cinema characteristics in taste and appreciation, an important feature of small national cinemas, particularly so in European contexts, and disproportionately so in post-communist countries such as Hungary and Romania. However, generic allegiances in storytelling and visual style are just as important, with a wink addressed even to video game characteristics—­cueing domestic genre preferences, but also a consideration for ‘global Hollywood’ characteristics. Both films have been considered historical social dramas, suggesting not only arthouse positioning, but also a middlebrow distanciation from popular cinema. Son of Saul presents a day in Auschwitz, that of a Sonderkommando (member of a concentration camp work gang) originally from a present-day Ukraine region, also inhabited by Hungarian ethnics. Aferim! engages with the South Romanian region formerly known as Wallachia in the first part of the nineteenth century when it was under Ottoman rule. Historical drama is, respectively, the second, and third most popular domestic film type of post-communist Hungarian and Romanian audiences, the first being comedy, and the second the present-day social problem film (Dumitrescu 2005; Vajdovich 2009; Varga 2009; Nasta 2013; Virginás 2016, 2017). The domestic generic coding into historical social drama of both films houses, in turn, an arthouse characteristic, that of the thematic-ideological imperative of embodying the respective small nations’ stereotypical, thus significant, Other(s)5: the Jewish in the case of Hungarian ethnic culture, and the Roma in the case of Romanian ethnic culture. Son of Saul explicitly frames the multiethnic origin of the concentration camp inhabitants, with the titular char-

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

179

acter choosing to speak Hungarian, although German, Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian figure prominently as spoken languages in the diegetic world. Saul Ausländer’s main task as a narrative agent—that of burying his supposed son according to Jewish burial traditions, in spite of the evident obstacles—stages the impossibility of a singular Hungarian identity. In Aferim! we are witnessing the pursuit of a supposedly fugitive Roma slave, and the hardships of the hunt offer multiple occasions for the examination of Roma, Romanian, Turkish, Greek and Jewish customs and values, with the audience offered the spectacle of historical Romanian identity, linguistically and culturally entangled within the web of a multiethnic landscape. However, somewhat in contrast to global Hollywood templates of historical social drama which paint long decades of social transformation, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), the narrative structure of both films is episodic in the tradition of European modernist arthouse cinema. In this respect the films conform to Kristin Thompson’s (1988) analysis of the pattern in Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), insofar as they are constructed around the happenings of roughly one day, with chance and unexpected moments colouring the narrative landscape. These features stand out in the context of the main characters’—Saul, the Sonderkommando member, and Constandin, the mercenary law-enforcement officer—goal-oriented institutional positioning. These characteristics suggest a hybridization of domestic genre—the historical social drama—with European arthouse features, added to which is an implicit acknowledgement of global generic storytelling rules as present in adventure narratives such as war films or Westerns. Both Son of Saul and Aferim! have been globally recognized as small national arthouse creations not only based on their successful dialogue with and mimicry of the domestic genre of historical social drama and of European arthouse characteristics but also thanks to their creative re-coding of specific sub-genres: the Second World War variant of the war film, and the runaway slave variant of the global Western. Nemes’ film exhibits similarities to such mainstream Hollywood or European creations as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) or Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014), and albeit with great caution, it can be suggested as participating in the dialogue that crystallizes around the Holocaust film, theorized by Barry Langford as one of the developments in the landscape of post-classical genres (2010: 262–266). Invoking runaway slave Westerns and the genre’s recent paradigmatic example, Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (2013), in reference to Aferim! is also plausible. In a YouTube interview for the All about Romanian Cinema (ARC) portal, director Radu Jude tells that their “initial aim was to make a kind of Western [un fel de Western]” (2015). At the same time, while repeating the conceptual artistic choice of ‘stitching’ arthouse approaches into domestic generic diegeses—described previously with reference to themes and narrative construction—both Son of Saul and Aferim! use post-analogue European arthouse aesthetics to represent the Hungarian Holocaust-era war film and the Romanian runaway slave Western. One must refer to the highly self-conscious usage of celluloid film stock, black-

180 

A. VIRGINÁS

Fig. 10.1  The ‘ethical close-up’ in Son of Saul

and-white colouring, desaturation, the employment of low-key or natural lighting, amateur(ish) performances and fully mobile cameras, which recreate Saul’s desperate and isolated existence often under threat of violence and death (see Fig. 10.1) and convey the futility and accidental happenings of the chase in Aferim! (see Fig. 10.2). These stylistic features—instead of being the only possibility—have become choices in a post-analogue context, mixing nostalgia for analogue filmic solutions with a fascination for digital developments (that possibly allow for a mimicking of analogue effects). However, the meso-level positioning of the films between the local (domestic genre and small national topic) and transnational (the war film and the Western), which is a condition of their regional significance, also means that global characteristics are also present. In Son of Saul, the continuous danger awaiting the human being confined in narrow spaces with bad visibility must be evoked in a framework constituted by the ‘Holocaust film’. Saul’s head/torso composed in a frontal or back close-up is the dominant visual element of the filmic image, and Jewish poet Géza Röhrig’s authentically embodied performance shown at a claustrophobic distance, as in this much publicized shot, does not allow an escape route to the viewer, who must take an ethical stance (see Fig. 10.1). Meanwhile Aferim! presents the audience with a template of moving human bodies, composed in wide natural panoramas, in order to convey a sense of the frontier in a Western film context, but with evident local specificities; as when protagonist Constandin raids a Roma camp by the river, looking for the fugitive. The wide action shot is a variation of the triptych

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

181

Fig. 10.2  The anti-racist triptych of Aferim!

structure ever-present in New Romanian Cinema, opposing the aggressive dominance of the Law of the Father represented by Constandin in the ornate garments, and the naive onlooker Son, to the stereotypically naked savage on the run/the Holy Spirit, thus implicitly deconstructing the racist discourse in Romanian culture (see Fig. 10.2). The implicit dialogue that Son of Saul and Aferim! are able to establish with classical narrative diegesis and ‘Hollywood’ must be highlighted as another important factor in these films’ (inter)national success, besides their transnational and also Pan-European market influences, and the possibilities for regional cooperation that have had fundamental effects on the production of both films.

Conclusion Multiple causality is at work in domestic taste formation in these post-­ communist small national cinema environments, generally dominated by Hollywood spectacles at their box offices and arthouse creations at state funding agencies. Nevertheless, the cases of the two films’ popularity should not be simplified as mimicry, or gestures of ‘self-colonization’, as post-colonial cultural theory would have it. These films, and the small national film industries examined, betray a knowledge of and adherence to European arthouse cinema’s artistic norms, while also being aware of their domestic audiences’ familiarity with and enjoyment of basically Hollywood-origin, genre-based classical storytelling, often mediated not only through cinematic, but also through

182 

A. VIRGINÁS

computer game platforms. Furthermore, an allegiance to domestic generic affinities is definitely present, even if these are not sufficient in themselves to generate domestic popularity with small national audiences watching Hollywood spectacles looking for fun and relaxation, as box-office data attests. This supports the observation that “[e]conomically, European films are so weak that they could not be shown on the big screen if the machinery of the blockbuster did not keep the physical infrastructure of cinema-going and public film culture going” (Elsaesser 2005, 17). Thus, somewhat in contrast to Hjort and Petrie’s positioning of their model of small national cinemas as something that allows going beyond what they name “an unfortunate relationship with a single dominant other, Hollywood” (Hjort and Petrie 2007: 1–2), the implicit dialogue that small national cinemas need to conduct with this “single dominant other” is indicative of a more entangled and active relationship. Thus an enlargement of at least two of Stephen Crofts’ (2006) seven types of national cinemas as defined against Hollywood posits itself as necessary. Crofts’ number three “European and Third World entertainment cinemas which struggle against Hollywood with limited or no success” are in need of redefinition as “struggling against Hollywood with some success”, as the rising domestic audience numbers in Hungary and Romania suggest. Furthermore, Crofts’ number five “anglophone cinemas which try to beat Hollywood at its own game” (Crofts 2006: 44–45) may be complemented by “non-anglophone, Eastern European, (even small national) cinemas”, as the cases of Son of Saul and Aferim! hopefully attest.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Reflect on your own national cinema(s): how or indeed can it/they be considered in terms of non/small national cinema? 2. Think of those small national cinemas you are most familiar with: can you see any similarities to Hungarian and/or Romanian cinemas, in terms of number of films produced, or of audiences? 3. Make a list of the features that are characteristic of Hungarian and Romanian small national cinemas: can you identify them in such small national creations as Irish, Belgian, Dutch, Icelandic, Croatian or Israeli films? 4. Reading Barry Langford’s (2010: 262–267) section on “non-canonical” genres, explain the critical and ethical implications raised by trying to apply genre theory to Holocaust films such as Son of Saul. 5. Watch Aferim! and, based on Langford’s (2010) description of the genre, enumerate its Western film characteristics. 6. Compare the non-ethical choices of Constandin while chasing the fugitive Roma slave to Saul’s betrayals while following his goal of burying the young boy. 7. How can one negotiate their freedom while cooperating with a repressive (state) apparatus? Analyse the characters and their artistic depiction from this angle.

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

183

Notes 1. Between five and six million in 2009, Romanian cinema attendances reached ten million in 2014 (Centrul National al Cinematografiei 2016). 2. Data published in the revision stage of this chapter (January 2019) shows that Hungarian domestic admissions surpassed one million viewers in both 2017 and 2018, with the highest grossing films of 2017–2018 (not included here) being the comedy sequel A Kind of America 3 (372,000 viewers), real-life-inspired thriller The Whiskey Bandit (2017; 327,000 viewers) and the comedy remake Happy New Year (2018; 160,000 viewers) (Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap 2015). 3. Data published in the revision stage of this chapter (January 2019) shows that Romanian domestic admissions grew from 280,000 in 2017 to 380,000 in 2018, with the highest grossing films of 2018 (not included here) being the historical social drama sequel The Moromete Family 2 (2018; 181,232 viewers), documentary Untamed Romania (2018; 81,426 admissions) and the comedy Kiss it! (2018; 23,252 viewers) (Blaga 2019). 4. Although attempting to summarize such a vast topic is futile, Bordwell et al.’s formulation is enlightening: the Hollywood cinema sees itself as bound by rules that set stringent limits on individual innovation; that telling a story is the basic formal concern, which makes the film studio resemble the monastery’s scriptorium, the site of the transcription and transmission of countless narratives; that unity is a basic attribute of film form; that the Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic’ in both an Aristotelian sense (truth to the probable) and a naturalistic one (truth to the historical fact); that the Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling; that the film should be comprehensible and unambiguous; and that it possesses a fundamental emotional appeal that transcends class and nation. (Bordwell et al. 2005: 2) 5. Indebtedness to Thomas Elsaesser’s conception referring to the functions of European national cinemas is evident: “putting forward the idea of a national cinema (as a theoretical construction) always existing face to face with an ‘other’” (Elsaesser 2005: 22).

References Blaga, Iulia. 2019. Moromete Family: On the Edge of Time Boosts Domestic Films Admissions in Romania. www.FilmnewEurope.com. http://filmneweurope.com/ news/romania-news/item/117459-moromete-family-on-the-edge-of-time-givesa-boost-to-domestic-film-admissions-in-romania. Accessed 10 January 2019. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 2005. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985. Bujdosó, Bori. 2015. Úgy kellett sírni, hogy ne mozogjon a kamera. VS. Hu. http:// vs.hu/magazin/osszes/ugy-kellett-sirni-hogy-ne-mozogjon-a-kamera-0610#!s0. Accessed 16 June 2015. Centrul Nat ̦ional al Cinematografiei. 2016. http://cnc.gov.ro/wp-content/ uploads/2017/06/Spectatori-film-romanesc-la-31-decembrie-2016.pdf Accessed 30 August 2017.

184 

A. VIRGINÁS

Crofts, Stephen. 2006. Reconceptualising National Cinema/s. In Theorising National Cinema, ed. Valetina Vitali and Paul Willemen, 44–58. London: BFI Publishing. Dumitrescu, Mircea. 2005. O privire critică asupra filmului românesc. Brașov: Arania. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. European Cinema. Conditions of Impossibility? In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 13–31. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Falkowska, Janina, and Lenuta Giukin. 2015. Introduction. In Small Cinemas in Global Markets. Genres, Identities, Narratives, ed. Lenuta Giukin, Janina Falkowska, and David Desser, 151–169. Lanham: Lexington. Gilić, Nikica. 2015. New Croatian Cinema: Literature and Genre in the Post-Yugoslav Era. In Small Cinemas in Global Markets. Genres, Identities, Narratives, ed. Lenuta Giukin, Janina Falkowska, and David Desser, 151–169. Lanham: Lexington. Giukin, Lenuta, Janina Falkowska, and David Desser, eds. 2015. Small Cinemas in Global Markets. Genres, Identities, Narratives. Lanham: Lexington. Hayward, Susan. 2001. Cinema Studies. The Key Concepts. London and New  York: Routledge. Hjort, Mette, and Duncan Petrie. 2007. Introduction. In The Cinema of Small Nations, 1–22. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hungary. The CIA World Factbook. https://www.cia.gov/LIBRARY/publications/ the-world-factbook/geos/hu.html. Accessed 21 April 2019. Hungary. World Bank Country Sheets. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY. GNP.PCAP.CD. Accessed 15 November 2017. Imre, Anikó. 2012. Introduction. Eastern European Cinema from No End to the End (As We Know It). In A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre, 1–21. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Jude, Radu. 2015. About Aferim. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lVh6Prx4p7c. Accessed 19 July 2016. Langford, Barry. 2010. Film Genre. Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Magyar Nemzeti Filmalap. 2015. http://mnf.hu/en/. Accessed 18 February 2015. Mingant, Nolwenn. 2011. A New Hollywood Genre: The Global-Local Film. In Global Media, Culture, and Identity: Theory, Cases, and Approaches, ed. Rohit Chopra and Radhika Gajjala, 142–155. New York and London: Routledge. Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. Neale, Stephen. 2002. Art Cinema as Institution. In The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler, 103–120. London: Routledge, 1981. Nemzeti Filmiroda. http://nmhh.hu/filmiroda/. Accessed 18 February 2015. Rapold, Nicholas. 2016. Cannes Interview: Cristi Puiu. Film Comment. http://www. filmcomment.com/blog/cannes-interview-cristi-puiu/. Accessed 19 July 2016. Romania. The CIA World Factbook. https://www.cia.gov/LIBRARY/publications/ the-world-factbook/geos/ro.html. Accessed 21 April 2019. Romania. World Bank Country Sheets. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY. GNP.PCAP.CD. Accessed 15 November 2017. Thompson, Kristin. 1988. Realism in the Cinema: Bicycle Thieves. In Breaking the Glass Armor. Neoformalist Film Analysis, 197–217. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Több mint egy egy millió magyar film néző a mozikban [More than 1 Million Viewers for Hungarian Films in Theatres]. 2019. Hungarian National Film Fund. https:// mnf.hu/hu/hirek/tobb-mint-1-millio-magyar-film-nezo-a-mozikban?fbclid=IwAR 1VcAW46NPhnOorgkYuvqQ4jkvNXwqStiuh0u6Vnm1Otp7OVCu2egylwRk#. Accessed 10 January 2019.

10  BETWEEN TRANSNATIONAL AND LOCAL IN EUROPEAN CINEMA: REGIONAL… 

185

Uricaru, Ioana. 2012. Follow the Money—Financing Contemporary Cinema in Romania. In A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre, 427–452. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Vajdovich, Györgyi. 2009. “Az egyszerű néző cirkuszi szórakozása”. Az 1931 és 1945 közötti magyar filmek megjelenítése a magyar filmtörténeti monográfiákban. Metropolis 3: 46–57. Varga, Balázs. 2009. Benne lenne? Magyar filmtörténeti toplisták és a kanonizáció kérdései. Metropolis 3: 32–44. Vasiliu, Luiza. 2016. Cristian Mungiu: Suntem o t ̦ară de oameni de treabă care ocolesc legea. Scena9. https://www.scena9.ro/article/interviu-cristian-mungiu-bacalaureat. Accessed 13 February 2019. Virginás, Andrea. 2014. A “kis mozik fogalma”: román és magyar filmgyártási példák. [The Concept of “Small Cinemas”: Romanian and Hungarian Examples of Film Production]. Filmszem, vol. 4, no. 3. http://filmszem.net/archivum/2014-negyedik-evfolyam. ———. 2016. Hungarian and Romanian Film Production in Transnational Frameworks: Small Domestic Taste. In Transformation Processes in Post-Socialist Screen Media, ed. Jana Dudková and Katarina Mišíková, 77–96. Bratislava: Academy of Performing Arts, Institute of Theatre and Film Research–The Slovak Academy of Sciences. ———. 2017. The “Hollywood Factor” in the Most Popular Hungarian Films of the Period 1996–2014: When a Small Post-Communist Cinema Meets a Mainstream One. In Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories, ed. Dorota Ostrowska, Francesco Pitassio, and Zsuzsanna Varga, 263–281. I.B. Tauris. Weekly box-office data. Cinemagia. http://www.cinemagia.ro/boxoffice/ romania/?date=09.03.2015. Accessed 15 September 2017. Weekly box-office data a. Est.hu, http://est.hu/mozi/toplista/#magyar/ dt=2015.02.12. Accessed 11 November 2015. Weekly box-office data b. Est.hu, http://est.hu/mozi/toplista/#magyar/ dt=2015.06.11. Accessed 15 September 2017.

CHAPTER 11

Crossing Borders: Investigating the International Appeal of European Films Huw D. Jones

Definitions Distribution A subsector of the film industry devoted to acquiring the commercial rights to release a film within a particular territory, then choosing its release strategy. The latter involves deciding when, how and in what format a film should be released (e.g. a ‘platform’ release involves screening a film in a few key cities to build up hype, before rolling it out to cinemas nationwide), as well as its promotional material (e.g. trailers, posters, social media activity). Independent Film A film produced without the financial or creative input of one of the major Hollywood studio companies (i.e. Fox, NBC Universal, Paramount, Sony, Walt Disney and Warner Bros). Some independent films may be distributed by the major Hollywood studios. Equally, some Hollywood studio productions may be released by an independent distributor. Non-national European (NNE) Film A feature film produced or primarily co-produced in one European country, but released in another (e.g. a French film released in Germany). The film’s

H. D. Jones (*) Department of Film, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_11

187

188 

H. D. JONES

country of origin refers to the country where the film’s main producer is legally based, rather than the country where the film is set. Thus a film produced by a French-registered company in co-production with a German partner and set in Britain is designated ‘French’.

Introduction Each February, photographers, reporters and film fans descend on Marlene Dietrich Platz in central Berlin to glimpse the stars parading the red carpet at the Berlinale Palast, the main venue of the Berlin International Film Festival. But a few streets away, in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a former museum located on the old East-West border, lies the real nerve centre of European cinema. Here, at the European Film Market, filmmakers meet distributors from across Europe in the hope of securing international distribution for their latest productions. For some, a successful deal could make the difference between global stardom and financial ruin. Around half of all films produced in Europe (defined here as the EU28 member states plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein) secure international distribution in another European country, according to the MeCETES (Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens) Film Database (which combines data from the European Audiovisual Observatory’s Lumiere Pro World database, the Internet Movie Database and other official industry statistics).1 Over a quarter are released in three or more European territories. However, the audience for these non-national European (NNE) films—that is, a film produced in one European country, but released in another (e.g. a French film released in Germany)—is often tiny. According to the MeCETES database, NNE films sell on average around 185,000 cinema tickets in Europe per year. Indeed, the median number of tickets sold—often a better measure of averageness than the mean, which tends to be skewed upwards by a small number of high-grossing films—is less than 8000 tickets. By comparison, American films (both Hollywood studio productions and independent films) sell on average 1.9 million tickets in Europe per year (a median of 100,000 tickets). Altogether, NNE films represent only 12% of cinema admissions in Europe, ranging from 29% in Switzerland to 3% in the UK. American films account for 65% of admissions, while ‘national’ European films (e.g. a French film consumed in France) take 21% of admissions. Films from the rest of the world (i.e. neither American nor European) make up the remaining 2% market share. Viewership of NNE films is not much higher on TV, DVD or Video-On-­ Demand (VOD). According to a 2014 survey for the European Commission (2014: 152), only 14% of EU citizens regularly watch NNE films across all media platforms. By comparison, 58% regularly watch American films, while 20% regularly watch films from their own country. The proportion of avid NNE film viewers ranges from 31% in Poland to 3% in Croatia. But regardless of nationality, these so-called Europhiles tend to be “younger, more often women

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

189

living in medium-sized cities, with low revenue, high education, good [media] equipment, heavy media viewing and easier access to theatres” (European Commission 2014: 109). They also tend to be more cosmopolitan in outlook. A similar survey by the MeCETES project, for example, found that Europhiles are more likely to identify themselves as ‘European’ and/or ‘citizens of the world’ than the EU population as a whole (MeCETES/YouGov 2017). Yet some NNE films do reach a larger audience. In the period 2005–2015, there were 219 NNE films—about 20 per year—which secured 1 million cinema admissions or more in Europe outside their designated country of origin, according to the MeCETES database. These ‘successful’ NNE films accounted for only 2% of European productions, but 70% of the total admissions for NNE films. The purpose of this chapter, then, is twofold. The first section explains why so few Europeans watch NNE films compared to American films or films from their own country. The second section explains why certain NNE films have successfully travelled within Europe. This analysis draws on key theories of international media flow. However, by testing these theories against empirical data on the production, distribution, cultural content and audience reception of NNE films, it also demonstrates that some NNE films successfully travel within Europe despite having few of the qualities associated with films with international appeal. Most successful NNE films, for example, are low-budget independent arthouse or middlebrow films with stories that are dialogue-heavy, complex and culturally specific. Nevertheless, they also possess certain characteristics that ensure they receive widespread distribution and thus higher audiences. These characteristics include major film awards, the involvement of international stars or a critically acclaimed director, and/or pre-sold material (e.g. based on a bestselling book). The final section examines in more detail one particularly successful NNE film which defies many of the principles of international media flow—the French comedy-drama Untouchable (2011) — to see what other factors enable European films to travel across European borders.

Why So Few Watch NNE Films: Cultural Factors Cultural factors go a long way to explaining why so few Europeans watch NNE films. Straubhaar (2003: 85), for example, argues audiences tend to “prefer media products from [their] own culture or the most similar possible culture”. Language is one of the main cultural barriers NNE films face: few watch films in languages they do not speak or comprehend. Subtitles help audiences in many European countries understand ‘foreign-language’ NNE films. But these can be difficult to follow, do not always convey the full meaning of the story and require considerable concentration (Kilborn 1993). In the UK, where most non–English language NNE films are screened with subtitles, only 14% of the population say they like subtitled films (BFI 2011: 27). But even NNE films expertly dubbed into local languages—the case with most

190 

H. D. JONES

‘­foreign-­language’ films released in French-, German-, Italian- and Spanishspeaking territories—still face diminished appeal if they feature “dress, ethnic types, gestures, body language, definitions of humor, ideas about story pacing, music traditions, [and] religious elements” audiences are unfamiliar with (La Pastina and Straubhaar 2005: 274). Comedies can be particularly difficult to export abroad, as jokes often rely on local reference points. Spanish Affair (2014), a romantic comedy about a Sevillian man struggling to woo a Basque woman, for example, sold over 9 million cinema tickets in Spain, but little more than 100,000 in the rest of Europe. Of course, American films face the same linguistic and cultural barriers when released in Europe. However, these are less of an issue, partly because English is Europe’s second language, but also because Europeans have become so accustomed to American culture after decades of exposure to US films, television shows and other media products (Bondebjerg and Redvall 2015). In any case, the major Hollywood studios responsible for the most commercially successful American films released in Europe and elsewhere have developed strategies to make their films more appealing to international audiences. Many successful Hollywood films, for example, are action/adventure blockbusters which place more emphasis on visual action and special effects than dialogue, making them easier to understand. They also tend to downplay cultural specificity (e.g. they are set in a fantasy world) or blend elements from different cultures and nationalities (Crane 2014). Even when they are culturally distinctive or dialogue-heavy, successful Hollywood films are often based on universally recognised ‘mythotypes’ (Olson 1999). These include the use of archetypal characters (e.g. heroes and villains) and circular stories, where a disruption in the status quo is eventually restored (e.g. the villain is killed). Finally, the most successful Hollywood films often feature ‘A-list’ stars who have established an international profile and fan base (De Vany and Walls 1999). Many also belong to well-established franchises (e.g. Star Wars), featuring reoccurring characters and scenarios international audiences have become familiar with over time. While some NNE films possess similar characteristics, most are less action-­ orientated and more culturally specific than Hollywood films. Less than one in ten NNE film releases are action/adventure films, compared with one in five US films, according to the MeCETES database. Many NNE films also conform to an ‘arthouse’ style, in which stories tend to be complex, ambiguous and open-ended (Bordwell 1979). While this can enhance their appeal amongst certain audiences (particularly those with higher levels of education), such characteristics can also make NNE films hard to follow. The European Commission (2014: 164) survey, for example, found that, while around three-­ quarters of EU citizens thought NNE films “feature diverse and complex characters”, “are original and thought-provoking” and “are less stereotypical than US films”, only about half thought they “feature clear plots”.

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

191

Why So Few Watch NNE Films: Industrial Factors Cultural factors only partly explain why so few watch NNE films. There are also important industrial factors to consider. Hoskins and Mirus (1988), for example, note that Hollywood studios have more money to invest in stars, special effects and other attributes likely to attract international audiences because they can draw on the resources of a large home market. Most European producers, by contrast, operate in small countries, which lack the capacity to finance big-budget productions (Henning and Alpar 2005). Even in a relatively large European country like France, the average film budget is less than US$7 million, compared with over US$250 million for some Hollywood blockbusters (European Audiovisual Observatory 2018; The Numbers 2018). The major Hollywood studios are also ‘vertically integrated’, which means they control both the production and the distribution of their own films (Hoskins et al. 1997: 45). This provides their films with a direct route to market and makes it easier to coordinate global promotional campaigns. Most European producers, by contrast, rely on smaller independent distributors, which often only operate in specific national territories. Consequently, NNE films often struggle to gain adequate publicity or access to screen space. According to the European Commission (2014: 164) survey, only a third of Europeans agree NNE films are “sufficiently available on screens in [their local] area” or “well promoted in [their local] area”. Policymakers have tried to address the industrial weaknesses of the European film sector. In 1991, the EU established the MEDIA programme to “increase the circulation and viewership of European audiovisual works inside and outside the European Union” (European Union 2006: Article 1, para. 2). During its 2007–2013 funding cycle, MEDIA provided €228 million to support the theatrical distribution of 1651 NNE films, €33 million for VOD distribution and €17 million for the Europa Cinema Network, a chain of 1100 cinemas which prioritise (national and non-national) European films (EACEA 2014). The Council of Europe, a cultural and human rights body separate from the EU, has likewise sought to strengthen the European film industries. In 1992, it introduced the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-productions, which made it easier for producers in different European countries to pool financial resources and produce bigger budget productions. It also created the Eurimages fund, which subsidises European co-productions. Since its establishment in 1988, Eurimages has supported 1962 co-productions for a total amount of approximately €574 million (Council of Europe 2018). However, these measures have had little success. Over the period 2005–2015, total admissions for NNE films actually declined, from 128.5 million to 103.0 million, while their market share fell from 15% to 11%, according to the MeCETES database. While the absolute number of European films securing distribution in another European country increased, from 472 films in 2005 to 634 films in 2015, the (mean) average admissions for these films slumped from 200,000 admissions to 33,000 admissions.

192 

H. D. JONES

There are several reasons why cinema ticket sales for NNE films have declined in recent years. Firstly, NNE films are facing more competition than ever. This is partly because digital filmmaking equipment has made it cheaper and easier to produce films, but also because new digital cinema screens allow “more opportunity to take films off and on” (Roberts cited in Clark 2014). According to the MeCETES database, France saw a 29% rise in the number of films released each year between 2005 and 2015; Britain a 53% increase; Italy a 54% increase; and Germany a 60% increase. This constant churn of new releases makes it harder for all but the most heavily marketed films to stand out and build an audience through positive word of mouth. As one German independent distributor puts it, “There are too many movies released theatrically …. This makes it much more difficult to find, buy and market the right films, especially in [the] case of small films” (Baumann cited in Heidsiek 2015). Secondly, young people—traditionally the most frequent cinemagoers—are visiting cinemas less often. In the UK, the proportion of cinemagoers aged 15–24 has declined from 35% in 2011 to 29% in 2016 (BFI 2017: 172). In France, the proportion of admissions generated by under 25-year-olds has likewise fallen from 40% in 2007 to 30% in 2015 (CNC 2016: 54). Arthouse and independent cinemas—the traditional champions of NNE films—have been hardest hit. As one Italian arthouse distributor puts it, “It takes one look to a 22:30 hrs screening, going always half empty while it used to be the most popular one, to realise young people are deserting cinemas” (Chiti cited in Weber 2016). One reason why young people are going to cinemas less often is because they can watch films for free or very cheaply online. This points to a third reason why NNE admissions are declining: the rise of VOD platforms. In 2016, over half of Europeans aged 15–24 watched at least one film or television show online per week, compared with only one in ten a decade earlier (European Commission 2016: 17). One consultancy predicts that by 2020 Netflix will have 38 million subscribers in Europe and will be available in a third of European households (Tretbar 2014). So far this has not reduced the overall number of cinemagoers. Indeed, admissions in Europe rose from 892 million in 2005 to 977 million in 2015, according to the MeCETES database. However, with a cinema ticket costing almost twice as much as a month’s Netflix subscription, most cinemagoers only seem willing to pay to see spectacular Hollywood blockbusters that necessitate the big screen experience.

Why Some NNE Films Travel Despite the challenges they face, some NNE films still successfully travel within Europe. Each year, about 20 NNE films secure one million admissions or more in Europe outside their designated country of origin. These ‘successful’ NNE films can be broadly subdivided—based on their stylistic conventions and target audience—into three further subcategories: commercial films (about eight per year), middlebrow films (another eight per year) and arthouse films (about four per year).

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

193

To explain why certain NNE films travel well within Europe, this section draws on two key sources of data extracted from the MeCETES Film Database. The first (see Table 11.1) is an indicative list of successful NNE films released in 2012, while the second (see Table 11.2) is a table summarising the key charTable 11.1  Successful NNE films released in Europe in 2012 Title

Category

Director(s)

Skyfall

Commercial Sam Mendes

Taken 2

Commercial Olivier Megaton The Impossible Middlebrow Juan Antonio Bayona Les Misérables Middlebrow Tom Hooper The Pirates! Band of Commercial Peter Lord, Misfits Jeff Newitt Cloud Atlas Middlebrow Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski A Turtle’s Tale 2: Commercial Vincent Sammy’s Escape from Kesteloot, Ben Paradise Stassen Anna Karenina Middlebrow Joe Wright The Best Exotic Middlebrow John Madden Marigold Hotel Astérix and Obélix: Commercial Laurent Tirard God Save Britannia Little Brother, Big Commercial Kari Juusonen, Trouble: A Christmas Jørgen Lerdam Adventure Amour Arthouse Michael Haneke The Woman in Black Middlebrow James Watkins The Angels’ Share Quartet

Arthouse

Ken Loach

Middlebrow Dustin Hoffman StreetDance 2 Commercial Dania Pasquini, Max Giwa Salmon Fishing in the Middlebrow Lasse Yemen Hallström The Hunt Arthouse Thomas Vinterberg Rust and Bone Arthouse Jacques Audiard

Country(s) of Primary origin language

NNE admissions

GB[Inc]/the English US FR English

29,627,349

ES

8,094,003

English

5,104,360

GB/the US English GB[Inc]/the English US DE/the US English

4,246,738 3,606,323

BE/FR/IT

English

2,907,117

GB GB[Inc]/the US/UA FR/ES/IT/ LT/BE FI/DE/ DK/IE

English English

2,896,669 2,586,204

French

2,531,206

Finnish

2,068,337

FR/DE/AT

French

2,005,640

GB[Inc]/the English US/SE GB/FR/ English BE/IT GB English

2,000,514

GB/DE/IT

English

1,197,684

GB

English

1,112,773

DK/SE

Danish

1,098,251

FR/BE

French

1,036,706

3,066,152

1,715,814 1,500,424

Source: MeCETES Film Database (2018) based on raw data from LUMIERE/European Audiovisual Observatory (European Territories) and IMDb Country ISO codes available here: http://lumiere.obs.coe.int/web/iso_codes/

194 

H. D. JONES

Table 11.2  Key cultural and industrial characteristics of NNE films by category of film

Source: MeCETES Film Database (2018) based on raw data from LUMIERE/European Audiovisual Observatory (European Territories), IMDb, Eurimages and MEDIA

acteristics (e.g. country of origin, budget, language, genre, awards) of all NNE films released in the period 2005–2015. This makes it possible to compare the cultural and industrial characteristics of ‘successful’ NNE films (column A)— that is, those which secured one million admissions or more in Europe outside their country of origin—with ‘unsuccessful’ NNE films (column B) to identify which particular characteristics (as indicated by a high percentage value in column C) may have enabled them to travel across national borders. Of course, some cultural characteristics (e.g. narrative structure) cannot be easily quantified. Thus, the analysis also examines in more detail the textual qualities of the most successful NNE films released in 2012 and how these have been received by audiences across Europe, drawing on focus groups conducted with NNE film viewers in Germany, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria and the UK. Combining these different methodological approaches makes it possible to develop a comprehensive understanding of why certain NNE films travel.

Commercial Films About eight successful NNE films per year are ‘commercial’ films. These include Hollywood-style action-adventure blockbusters (e.g. Skyfall, Taken 2) and family films and animations (e.g. Pirates! Band of Misfits, A Turtle’s Tale 2,

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

195

Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia) likely to appeal to a mainstream audience, which primarily watches films for entertainment, rather than their cultural or educational value. Commercial NNE films possess many of the attributes associated with films which travel well. Industrially, they have high budgets (US$71 million on average) and are mainly produced in large European countries, notably the UK, which makes the James Bond franchise, but also to a lesser extent France, where Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp has established a strong reputation for English-­ language Hollywood-style action films, such as the Taken film series. Though officially ‘European’, two-fifths involve the financial backing of a major Hollywood studio. The Bond film Skyfall (2012), for example, was made with inward investment from Sony and MGM. A high proportion are also distributed in Europe by major Hollywood studios—meaning they benefit from wide distribution and heavy marketing. When it was released in early November 2012, Skyfall, for example, was screened in 825 theatres in France, 632 theatres in Italy and 1265 theatres in Germany (Box Office Mojo 2018). In terms of their cultural content, commercial NNE films often feature universal mythotypes, including archetypal characters, awe-inspiring spectacles and circular stories. In Skyfall, for example, action hero James Bond is on a mission to capture Raoul Silva, a villain who has destroyed the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s secret service, and leaked the names of its undercover agents. The film opens with a spectacular chase scene involving an extended fight sequence on the roof of a speeding train between Bond and the mercenary Patrice, who has stolen a hard drive containing details of the MI6 agents. It ends, in line with the conventions of a circular story, with Bond killing his nemesis Silva, thus resolving the disruption Silva has caused, and returning to the rebuilt MI6 headquarters in London to accept another mission, signalling a restoration of the status quo. Commercial NNE films have other cultural characteristics which may explain their international appeal. The discourse surrounding these films suggests that many are seen as ‘American’ or films without too much cultural specificity, even though they often feature European stories, characters and settings. For example, although Skyfall is mainly set in London and the Scottish Highlands and features extensive British national symbolism—the film ends with Bond standing defiantly on the roof of the MI6 headquarters watching a Union flag flying against the backdrop of the Houses of Parliament, the seat of British democracy and symbol of the British nation state (see Fig. 11.1)—it was not necessarily seen as a ‘culturally British’ film by European audiences, particularly in territories where it was dubbed into local languages. One German focus group participant, for example, said Skyfall “looks very American with all the action”. Another Italian focus group participant said he “totally forgot” that Bond was British, despite seeing Skyfall, his “favourite film ever”, “at least fifteen times”. Many commercial NNE films also feature stories or characters that European audiences are well acquainted with, either because they are sequels to earlier box office hits (e.g. Niko 2, A Turtles Tale 2, Taken 2, Street Dance 2) or because

196 

H. D. JONES

Fig. 11.1  British national symbols in Skyfall

they belong to well-established franchises (e.g. James Bond, Asterix). One German focus group participant, for example, described Skyfall as “classic Bond”, while another Italian focus group participant praised the film for going “back to [the] origins” of the Bond franchise.

Arthouse Films Around four or five successful NNE films each year are ‘arthouse’ films. These are generally serious dramas aimed at university-educated audiences, who watch films for their cultural or artistic value, rather than purely for entertainment. This is a much more niche audience. According to the British Film Institute (BFI 2011), only 14% of Britons say they like arthouse films. The European Commission (2014: 147) survey likewise suggests only a quarter of Europeans watch films “to discover and learn about people and cultures”. Nevertheless, through combining the small numbers of arthouse fans in different Europeans countries, some arthouse NNE films can reach a quite significant international audience. Significantly, the films in this category have few of the characteristics associated with films which travel well. Industrially, they are generally low-budget productions (US$9 million on average) made by small, independent companies, albeit with the financial support of major national and European film funds, such as the BFI or Eurimages. Though most are produced in large European countries, a relatively high proportion come from smaller European nations, such as Denmark (e.g. The Hunt) and Belgium (which co-produced Rust and Bone). Few receive the financial support of major Hollywood studios, and most are released by small, independent distributors (e.g. Curzon Artificial Eye in the UK).

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

197

In terms of their cultural content, arthouse NNE films typically feature stories that are dialogue-heavy, episodic and open-ended, often touching on controversial or socially relevant subject matter. In The Hunt (2012), for example, a kindergarten teacher is ostracised from a small-town community after being accused of sexually abusing his best friend’s daughter. Though the allegation is eventually proven false, it remains ambiguous whether his life has returned to normal. In the final scene, he appears to be shot at during a hunting expedition with friends, leaving viewers wondering whether he has really been exonerated by the local community. Arthouse NNE films are also more culturally specific than most films with international appeal. The Angels’ Share (2012), for example, features characters with heavy Glaswegian accents and dialogue, as well as numerous Scottish cultural references and in-jokes. These include the film’s central conceit, which involves a group of unemployed Glaswegians stealing a precious Highland whisky from a distillery using empty Irn-Bru bottles, a cheap, sugary fizzy drink popular with working-class Scots. Specific cultural references are particularly evident in the scene towards the end of the film, in which Albert, the clumsy member of the group, makes a defiant speech against the police who have just stopped and searched him for no apparent reason. On the one hand, Albert’s stance—head held high, arms outstretched in a Christ-­ like pose—could be read as an almost universal gesture of defiance (see Fig. 11.2). However, the full significance of Albert’s performance may be lost on audiences outside Scotland who are unfamiliar with the meanings associated with his dress—notably his hooded Lonsdale tracksuit top, which identifies him as a ‘ned’ (or delinquent working-class youth), but when worn in combination with his tartan kilt gives the latter new meaning as a working-class symbol of Scottishness—or who do not recognise the names of the various Scottish cultural icons (“We shall not be moved. Billy Connolly, Robert the Bruce, Braveheart, ya bastards… Alex Ferguson. We are the fucking champions.”) he calls out to the police.

Fig. 11.2  Scottish cultural references in The Angels’ Share

198 

H. D. JONES

Nevertheless, the arthouse films that travel best in Europe have certain advantages over most NNE film releases. Firstly, they are often directed by well-established ‘auteurs’—critically acclaimed directors who have developed a recognisable style across a significant body of work. Ken Loach, who directed The Angels’ Share, for example, was particularly well known amongst Italian focus group participants, with one respondent calling him “a must-see director” and another describing him as “very famous”. The only other European auteur to elicit a similar response was the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Secondly, successful arthouse NNE films often feature actors who have established a name for themselves in both European and Hollywood films. This is particularly the case with films made by less-well-known directors. The Hunt, for example, features Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish actor familiar to many focus group participants from his appearance as a Bond villain in Casino Royale (2006). Thirdly, successful arthouse NNE films have often won major awards. Amour (2012), for example, won both the 2012 Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes film festival, and the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Likewise, The Angels’ Share and Rust and Bone (2012) both played in competition for the 2012 Palme d’Or, while The Hunt was shortlisted for the foreign-language Oscar in 2013. This sense of quality or critical acclaim is further reinforced by the fact that successful arthouse NNE films also score better reviews than most NNE films (with an average Metacritic score of 79% compared with 63%). However, positive reviews alone do not guarantee international success: Almayer’s Folly (2012), a film with one of the highest Metacritic scores in 2012, sold only 11,000 tickets outside its native Belgium. Fourthly, though their narratives are less predictable than successful commercial NNE films or Hollywood films, successful arthouse NNE films often feature generic conventions that broaden their audience appeal. The Angels’ Share, for example, was marketed in mainland Europe as a comedy. Likewise, The Hunt follows the conventions of a thriller. Finally, the distribution of successful arthouse NNE films is often heavily subsidised by the EU’s MEDIA programme. Amour, for example, received over €1 million to support its distribution across 23 territories; Rust and Bone €950,000 across nine territories; The Angels’ Share €700,000 across 23 territories; and The Hunt €600,000 across 20 territories. This compares with an average MEDIA award of around €130,000.

Middlebrow Films The remaining successful NNE films—about eight per year—could be described as ‘middlebrow’ films. These are generally period dramas, comedy-dramas or other types of ‘quality’ film that, according to Liz (2016: 32), “occupy the middle-ground between serious critical art films and stylish, generally consensual mainstream productions”. As such, they have crossover appeal to both mainstream cinemagoers and a more niche arthouse audience. The films in this category have some of the characteristics associated with films which travel well, but not others. Industrially, they have medium-sized

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

199

budgets (US$24 million on average) and are mainly produced in larger European countries, notably Britain (e.g. Les Misérables, Anna Karenina) and to a lesser extent France, but also Germany (e.g. Cloud Atlas) and Spain (e.g. The Impossible), albeit as English-language productions involving international co-production partners. Some are produced by independent companies, though often with the financial support of major television broadcasters like Canal+ or the BBC, and/or the financial and distribution support of large European players like Wild Bunch, Studiocanal or eOne. Others are financed and distributed by major Hollywood studios. Les Misérables (2012) and Anna Karenina (2012), for example, were both produced by the British-based Working Title Films, a subsidiary of NBC Universal. In terms of their cultural content, these films are more dialogue-heavy and complex than commercial films, but less open-ended and challenging than arthouse films. They can be culturally specific, yet also tend to feature so-called pre-sold content which educated audiences in Europe are likely to be familiar with. Many, for example, are adapted from classical works of literature (e.g. Les Misérables, Anna Karenina) or more recent bestselling novels (e.g. Cloud Atlas, The Woman in Black). Others focus on well-known historical figures or events, or else centre on extraordinary ‘true-life’ stories. The Impossible (2012), for example, tells the story of a Western family who, against the odds, survive the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Like their arthouse counterparts, successful middlebrow NNE films generally involve well-known creative personnel—though the film’s star, rather than the director, tends to be their main selling point. Again, these are usually actors who have made a name for themselves in both Hollywood and European films, though they tend to be British rather than continental European actors, such as the star of Trainspotting and Star Wars Ewan McGregor (The Impossible, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) or the Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel). Most successful middlebrow NNE films have also won major awards, though these tend to the big American prizes, such as the Oscars or Golden Globes, rather than the more specialised European awards like the Palme d’Or. Both Les Misérables and Anna Karenina, for example, won Academy Awards, while Naomi Watts was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Impossible. Likewise, Cloud Atlas (2012), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), Quartet (2012) and Salmon Fishing on the Yemen (2012) were all nominated for Golden Globe Awards.

Case Study: Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, 2011) Though some successful NNE films possess the cultural and industrial characteristics associated with films with international appeal (e.g. high budgets, Hollywood studio distribution, universal mythotypes, English-language content, A-list film stars and a lack of cultural specificity), the majority do not fit this model. Each year about four arthouse NNE films and eight middlebrow

200 

H. D. JONES

NNE films secure over one million admissions in Europe outside their country of origin, despite having relatively low budgets, independent distribution and screen content that, to a greater or lesser extent, could be construed as dialogue-­ heavy, narratively complex and culturally specific. At the same time, these films have other attributes that account for their international appeal. Most have won major film awards, feature a transatlantic film star, are helmed by a European auteur, or are based on ‘pre-sold’ material (e.g. a bestselling book or well-known historical figure). To be sure, these attributes are not necessarily what audiences look for in NNE films—as one focus group respondent put it, “I choose the film for the story, not the awards”. But they do ensure such films secure international distribution—buyers often “prioritise well-known directors” (Borgonon, cited in Jones 2016) or believe “You need a movie that has won a prize” (Chiti cited in Anon 2018)—which in turn leads to greater publicity and audience recognition. That said, not all successful arthouse or middlebrow NNE films possess major awards, famous stars, a well-known director or pre-sold material. This final section looks at one particularly successful NNE film that defies many of the principles of international media flow to see what further lessons can be learnt about why some NNE films travel well within Europe. Untouchable is a French comedy-drama about the unlikely friendship between a white disabled millionaire (‘Philippe’ played by François Cluzet) and his black streetwise ex-con carer (‘Driss’ played by Omar Sy). The film premiered at the Donostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival in September 2011, then went on general release in France in November 2011, before showing elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world throughout 2012. It was a smash hit in its native France, selling 21 million cinema tickets, but also performed surprisingly well in the rest of Europe, too. According to the MeCETES database, the film sold 9.5 million tickets in Germany, 2.8 million in Italy and 2.6 million in Spain. In Switzerland it was seen by 19% of the population, in Demark by 13% and in the Netherlands by 9%. Indeed, the only major European territory where the film failed to make an impact at the box office was the UK. The film continued to draw viewers when it was later released on DVD and VOD. According to the European Commission (2014: 167) survey, 38% of Europeans have seen the film, of which 95% said they liked it. On the face of it, Untouchables seems an unlikely international success story. The film not only touches on serious issues to do with race, disability and social exclusion, but could also be construed as culturally distinct and dialogue-heavy. In most European territories, the film was screened in French with local-­ language subtitles, but even in countries where it was dubbed, the film would have faced cultural barriers in relation to its jokes and local reference points. For example, the film requires some knowledge of the discourse surrounding the banlieue, the low-income housing projects of the Parisian suburbs in which mainly immigrants and French of foreign descent reside. The film stars Omar Sy and François Cluzet—two actors largely unknown outside France at the time of the film’s release in 2011–2012—and was written

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

201

and directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, filmmakers with few previous credits to their name. The film itself was inspired by the true life story of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and his French-Algerian caregiver Abdel Sellou, which the directors discovered through the television documentary film À la vie, à la mort (2003). Yet neither Pozzo di Borgo nor the documentary were widely known before the film’s release. The film was produced by Gaumont, a French mini-major studio, and involved financial support from various partners, including the major French commercial broadcaster TF1. But the budget was a relatively modest US$11 million. One potentially significant partnership was the involvement of US-based The Weinstein Company (TWC), which, prior to its downfall in 2018 following the well-publicised allegations of sexual abuse made against company boss Harvey Weinstein, had built a very strong reputation for producing and distributing commercially successful independent films. However, TWC was no Hollywood major: it only had the means to distribute the film in the US. In Europe, Untouchable relied on a patchwork of independent distributors, ranging from relatively large companies like Senator Film Verleih (now Wild Bunch) in Germany to more boutique outfits like Victory Productions in Belgium. Other elements likely to increase its international appeal were also missing. In the build up to its release, the film picked up some awards, including the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix award for the best film at the Tokyo International Film Festival. But none of these were major prizes likely to bring it worldwide attention. The film was selected as France’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar in 2012, but failed to make the final shortlist. Critics, meanwhile, largely scorned the film. In the UK, The Independent called it “a third-rate buddy movie that hardly understands its own condescension” (Quinn 2012), while Sight and Sound claimed the film “shamefully traffics in racist stereotypes” (Dawson 2012: 107). Its aggregate Metacritic score was a modest 57%. Nevertheless, Untouchable does have some elements which account for its international appeal. Though the film is culturally distinct, it features universally recognised mythotypes. Driss and Philippe, for example, are archetypal characters who essentially mirror each other (black/white, poor/rich, able bodied/disabled, criminal/respectable, popular tastes/elite tastes). Indeed, the film follows in a long tradition of films which derive their humour from the ‘odd couple’ or ‘cultural clash’ scenario. The film also follows a conventional narrative structure, in which a disruption to the status quo (Philippe hires the unconventional Driss as his new carer) leads to a moment of realisation (Driss teaches Philippe to enjoy life again), then a second disruption (Driss returns to the banlieue, leaving Philippe sad and lonely again), before the narrative is eventually resolved (Driss comes back to Philippe and drives him to Dunkirk to meet Eléonore, his love). These formulaic elements may have undermined the film’s appeal with critics, but made it easier for international audiences to understand. Furthermore, according to a report for the French Film Export Association (Orchillers 2015), some of the story’s more obscure cultural reference points

202 

H. D. JONES

were expunged from international versions of the film. Gaumont, for example, produced an adaptation guide for foreign distributors with advice on how jokes should be translated. So, when Driss says the line “Viens ici Patrick Juvet”, the guide explained that Patrick Juvet is a has-been celebrity in France, so distributors could find a local equivalent. Gaumont also commissioned an international poster that laid less emphasis on the film’s stars, as was the case with the film’s original French poster, and more on its ‘odd couple’ scenario by picturing Driss pushing Philippe in his wheelchair. This was further emphasised by the way the film’s title was translated in some European territories as ‘Almost Friends’ (‘Quasi amici’—Italian), ‘Friends Forever’ (‘Amigos para Siempre’— Spain) or ‘An Unexpected Friendship’ (‘En oväntad vänskap’—Swedish). Focus groups on the film highlight two further reasons why Untouchable was so popular in Europe. The first is to do with the way the film combines serious issues with comedy. According to one focus group participant, the use of humour “added positivity to a story which was potentially tragic” making the film “light and funny”. As another participant put it: The film is not only funny. It’s also very moving, because it’s able to make you laugh about a serious issue such as disability. When a film is able to do such things, to make you laugh about serious themes, it means that it’s well done.

Combining serious themes with comedic elements meant the film could appeal to both arthouse audiences, who like films that are thought-provoking and serious, and a more mainstream audience, who prefer films that are funny and entertaining. The other main reason why focus groups said they liked the film was the fact it is based on a true story. For one focus group participant, this meant “you appreciate it more, [because] knowing that these kind of stories do happen in real life is somehow reassuring. [It] makes you feel better”. The significance of Untouchable being based on a true story is not so much the fact that it portrays real people or events, but rather what the story represents: a friendship between two people from very different social and ethnic backgrounds. This not only made the biracial pairing of Philippe and Driss seem less contrived, but also, as a report for the European Commission (2014: 813) put it, “reaffirms our belief in life and how society works successfully when we all co-operate”. At a time of growing divisions in Europe due to the Eurozone debt crisis, the north African and Syrian refugee crisis, and the rise of nationalist and xenophobic movements, this message of social and ethnic unity had particular resonance for the liberal, cosmopolitan Europhile audience who tend to enjoy NNE films.

Conclusion Any European filmmaker hoping to secure an international distribution deal at the European Film Market in Berlin might feel a bit depressed having read this chapter. The lesson from the industry data and focus group discussions anal-

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

203

ysed in this chapter seems to be this: your film is unlikely to travel well in Europe unless it is: (a) a big-budget Hollywood-style action/adventure blockbuster or animation; (b) a medium-budget middlebrow quality drama based on a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning Hollywood star attached or (c) a low-budget MEDIA-supported arthouse film made a Palme d’Or–winning auteur. Nevertheless, NNE films like Untouchable do offer a glimmer of hope. They demonstrate that low-budget foreign independent films can achieve international box office success. Such films achieve this by striking a balance between the conventions of commercial Hollywood cinema and European arthouse cinema—that is, between a popular cinema which downplays cultural specificity, emphasises visual action and features generic characters and stories, and a specialised cinema which is more dialogue-heavy, culturally specific and complex. European cinema may not be able to match Hollywood in terms of budgets and star power. But it still manages to achieve occasional international successes by offering international film audiences something different—a cinema that is both serious and funny, thought-provoking and entertaining, culturally distinct and yet universally recognisable.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Examine a poster or film trailer for a recent European film release. What aspects of the film are emphasised in this publicity material (e.g. the film’s stars, the story, director, awards, reviews)? What type of audience do you think the film is being targeted at? 2. Download the European Audiovisual Observatory’s Focus: World Film Market Trends (2017) report (https://rm.coe.int/focus-2017/ 168088dcab). Compare the top 20 films for different European countries. What types of films have performed well across Europe, and which films have only been popular within particular European territories? How do you explain these trends? 3. Look at the ‘Top 25 European films (including EUR inc) by admissions in the European Union: 2016’ on page 20 of the Focus report. How many films on the list are co-productions involving two or more countries? How have these international partnerships affected (if at all) the cultural identity of the film and its box office performance?

Note 1. Mediating Cultural Encounters through European Screens (MeCETES) was a three-year project (2014–2017) on the transnational production, distribution and reception of European film and television drama. Supported by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Programme under grant number 291827, it involved partners from the University of York, University

204 

H. D. JONES

of Copenhagen and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. The author was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ‘film’ strand of the project, based at the University of York. He was responsible for gathering, analysing and disseminating data on which European films travel well within Europe, how these films represent other European nations, cultures and identities, and how audiences engage with such screen fictions. He also managed the project website and blog: www.mecetes.co.uk.

References Anon. 2018. Cannes 2018: What Are Buyers Looking For? Screen Daily, May 7. https://www.screendaily.com/features/cannes-2018-what-are-buyers-lookingfor/5128918.article. Accessed 20 August 2018. BFI. 2011. Opening Our Eyes: How Film Contributes to the Culture of the UK. London: BFI. ———. 2017. Statistical Report 2017. London: BFI. Bondebjerg, Ib, and Eva Novrup Redvall. 2015. Introduction: Mediated Cultural Encounters in Europe. In European Cinema and Television: Cultural Policy and Everyday Life, ed. Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall, and Andrew Higson, 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bordwell, David. 1979. The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice. Film Criticism 4 (1): 56–64. Box Office Mojo. 2018. Skyfall. Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=bond23.htm. Accessed 20 August 2018. Clark, Nick. 2014. Too Many Films Are Released Each Year, Says British Film Institute. July 24. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/too-manyfilms-are-released-each-year-says-british-film-institute-9626850.html. Accessed 20 August 2018. CNC. 2016. Results 2015: Films, Television Programs, Production, Distribution, Exhibition, Exports, Video, New Media. Paris: CNC. Council of Europe. 2018. Co-production Funding History. https://www.coe.int/en/ web/eurimages/co-production-funding-history. Accessed 20 August 2018. Crane, Diana. 2014. Cultural Globalization and the Dominance of the American Film Industry: Cultural Policies, National Film Industries, and Transnational Film. International Journal of Cultural Policy 20 (4): 365–382. Dawson, Tom. 2012. Untouchable. Sight & Sound, October, p. 107. De Vany, Arthur, and David W. Walls. 1999. Uncertainty in the Movie Industry: Does Star Power Reduce the Terror of the Box Office? Journal of Cultural Economics 23 (4): 285–318. EACEA. 2014. MEDIA 2007 Results [Database]. Accessed 20 August 2018. European Audiovisual Observatory. 2018. Yearbook 2017/2018: Key Trends. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory. European Commission. 2014. A Profile of Current and Future Audiovisual Audience: Final Report. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. ———. 2016. Flash Eurobarometer 437: Internet Users’ Preferences for Accessing Content Online. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

11  CROSSING BORDERS: INVESTIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL… 

205

European Union. 2006. Decision No 1718/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 November 2006 Concerning the Implementation of a Programme of Support for the European Audiovisual Sector (MEDIA 2007). Official Journal of the European Union 49: 12–30. Heidsiek, Birgit. 2015. European Distribution: Focus on Germany. Europa Distribution, May 5. http://www.europa-distribution.org/european-distribution-focus-on-germany/. Accessed 20 August 2018. Henning, Victor, and Andre Alpar. 2005. Public Aid Mechanisms in Feature Film Production: The EU MEDIA Plus Programme. Media Culture & Society 27 (2): 229–250. Hoskins, Colin, and Rolf Mirus. 1988. Reasons for the United-States Dominance of the International-Trade in Television Programs. Media Culture & Society 10 (4): 499–515. Hoskins, Colin, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn. 1997. Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business. Oxford: Clarendon. Jones, Huw D. 2016. The Production, Distribution and Reception of Italian Quality Cinema: The Case of Cultural Interest Films. Comunicazioni Sociali 3: 361–374. Kilborn, Richard. 1993. Speak My Language: Current Attitudes to Television Subtitling and Dubbing. Media Culture & Society 15 (4): 641–660. La Pastina, Antonio C., and Joseph Straubhaar. 2005. Multiple Proximities between Television Genres and Audiences: The Schism Between Telenovelas’ Global Distribution and Local Consumption. International Communication Gazette 67 (3): 271–288. Liz, Mariana. 2016. Euro-visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema. New  York: Bloomsbury. MeCETES. 2018. MeCETES Film Database [Database]. Accessed 20 August 2018. MeCETES/YouGov. 2017. European Film Survey [Dataset]. Accessed 20 August 2018. Olson, Scott R. 1999. Hollywood Planet: Global Media and the Competitive Advantage of Native Transparency. London: Erlbaum. Orchillers, Hugo. 2015. Le Livre Blanc de l’export: L’export : un métier stratégique et créatif. Association des Exportateurs de Films. http://www.newsletterpro. languedoc-roussillon-cinema.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ADEF_Livre_ Blanc_Export.pdf. Accessed 20 August 2018. Quinn, Anthony. 2012. Untouchable (15). The Independent, November 21. https:// www.independent.co.uk/ar ts-enter tainment/films/r eviews/untouchable-15-8160904.html. Accessed 20 August 2018. Straubhaar, Joseph D. 2003. Choosing National TV: Cultural Capital, Language, and Cultural Proximity in Brazil. In The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, ed. M.G. Elasmar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. The Numbers. 2018. Movie Budgets. https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all. Accessed 20 August 2018. Tretbar, Alex. 2014. Netflix Could Top 100 Million International Subscribers by 2020. Digital Trends, September 22. https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/ netflix-could-top-100-million-international-subscribers-by-2020/. Accessed 20 August 2018. Weber, Isabella. 2016. European Distribution: Focus on Italy. Europa Distribution, August 8. http://www.europa-distribution.org/european-distribution-focus-onitaly/. Accessed 20 August 2018.

CHAPTER 12

Technology, Decentralisation and the Periphery of European Filmmaking: Greece and Scandinavia in Focus Olga Kolokytha

Definitions Creative Industries A term used extensively in cultural policy and European Union (EU) documents after 2000. The Department of Culture, Media and Sports in the UK provided a definition in its first Creative Industries Mapping Document in 1998 and recognises creative industries as those industries that are rooted in individual creativity, talent and skill and have the potential to generate wealth and jobs by the exploitation of intellectual property (DCMS 2001). Decentralisation The notion of transfer away from the centre, the core. Here, the term is used to describe, variously: the movement of film production from centre to periphery geographically as a matter of policy; the shift of the boundaries of film as a form as a result of technological developments; and also a shift in production to less standardised methods as a result of the Greek crisis.

O. Kolokytha (*) Department of Communication, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_12

207

208 

O. KOLOKYTHA

Greek Weird Wave The term, emerging first in popular critical discourse, refers to those Greek films that began to appear during the Greek crisis (from around 2009) and which are characterised by distinctive, unusual, sometimes absurd, narrative and aesthetics. Examples of films that belong to the Weird Wave include Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), Suntan (2016) and Attenberg (2010), which is the case study of this chapter. For more on the Greek Weird Wave, see Papadimitriou (2018), Calotychos, Papadimitriou and Tzoumakis (2016), and Papadimitriou (2014).1 Supranational Transcending national boundaries. The term is very often used with reference to power and law, such as, for example, in the case of the European Union.

Introduction Film has a particular significance for the European Union, seen as a ‘fundamental good’ for citizens, a denominator of common European cultural memory, cultural heritage and cultural identity. According to Bergfelder (2005), European film is important both for national and for supranational interests as a provider of national identity and of a sense of belonging to a supranational community, and has been strongly associated with European integration and the European project. European Union policy discourse has treated film both as a creative industry and as a system of values and identity (Kolokytha and Sarikakis 2018); as such, it has both a cultural and an industrial element, creating both cultural and economic value (Bondebjerg 2016; De Vinck and Lindmark 2012). This dual nature of film, with one foot in industry and the other in culture, is the starting point of this chapter, which discusses the developments in filmmaking and production in Europe, evolving around film’s cultural and economic value. Its focus is on technology and decentralisation and their influence on style or form with emphasis on the periphery of Europe. The chapter is divided into three sections: the first section discusses filmmaking and production from the perspective of the economy; maps the European film landscape, presenting data on admissions, audiences and trends; and then discusses the influence of technology on cinemas, on audiences and distribution, and in filmmaking. The second section takes examples from Northern and Southern Europe to demonstrate the different perspectives and tensions filmmaking is facing in the northern and southern peripheries of Europe. The choice of these two regions is made deliberately, and reflects the completely different ways film is seen in these regions. Greece is discussed as an example within the European periphery not just because of its geographic location but also because of the

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

209

ongoing crisis and the changes, challenges and novelties it has brought to the film sector in the country. The notion of decentralisation prevails in the second section and is visible through three different angles: geographic decentralisation; the crossing of boundaries of the form; and the shift towards less standardised processes of film production. In the Northern European context, within the framework of decentralisation where local production develops, the new distribution channels that emerge as a result of technology have led to film not seen as an exclusively cinematic presentation. In the case of Greece, decentralisation comes as a result of financial reasons and challenges structure, form and production. The third section is devoted to the case study, which discusses Attenberg (2010), incorporating the elements mentioned in the previous sections of the chapter.

The European Film Landscape: Technological Developments and Trends The importance attributed to the film sector at a European level is mirrored in the numerous policy documents and initiatives related to it, such as the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production (Council of Europe 1992), first adopted in 1992 and revised in 2017, aiming to encourage European cooperation in the domain of film; the LUX Prize, established by the European Parliament to support the circulation of European films (European Parliament 2014); and the various MEDIA programmes—one of the most prominent initiatives of the European Commission, aimed at strengthening the development of production, supporting transnational mobility of works, offering training opportunities to audiovisual industry professionals and strengthening the audiovisual sector by offering opportunities for and use of digital technologies (Kolokytha and Sarikakis 2018; Serra 2014). Economic integration and the establishment of a European common market have all led to increasing EU intervention in European film (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012: 38). The European Commission has also introduced a series of legal instruments with reference to the film industry in Europe, such as the Television Without Frontiers (TWF) directive and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), which promote European works using quota provisions (European Parliament 2014). Particular reference to audiovisual works is made in the 2011 Green Paper on the Online Distribution of Audiovisual Works in the European Union, where the significance of technological development, as well as issues related to the digital single market, is stressed (European Commission 2011). The European film landscape consists mostly of small and micro businesses which have considerable difficulties in attracting private financing, mainly because of the high-risk nature of the industry, and therefore have to rely on public funding (European Parliament 2014). There are also few European producing companies with a steady production flow that produce more than one

210 

O. KOLOKYTHA

film per year (European Parliament 2014). The presence of the big Hollywood players is strong in the European arena, hindering the entrance and development of smaller European companies (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012: 6), and the majority of European films do not recover costs, leaving small companies facing difficulties in remaining in the market and developing further (European Parliament 2014). As Sand argues (2018: 85–86), film policy and funding at the European level have been necessary to respond to the deficiencies of national film production and Hollywood domination. It is impossible to consider film without also considering technology. According to De Vinck and Lindmark (2012: 46), the development of technology has influenced the film sector in manifold ways, has facilitated creative expression and business innovations, and its impact can be seen in different historical periods and areas, in each of which transitions have taken long periods of time, and have enabled new players to enter the scene. The authors (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012) identify costs, availability of content and audience reaction as incentives to adopting the new developments. During the past decade, the rapid growth of digital media has profoundly changed film notions and practices, with regard to both audiences and filmmakers (Papadimitriou 2017). New developments include increases in home cinema and mobile viewing, as well as changes in funding models and access to financing. These trends are observable in a global context, but also in  local contexts, where they are affected by different conditions and factors (Papadimitriou 2017). Dahlström and Hermelin (2007) argue that technological developments and improvements in travel and communication have also impacted on the mobility of film production and have increased competition for film projects, which, in turn, has made the role of regional and national film commissions in attracting film production more important. Cinema operators have invested in the transition to digital cinema, particularly in the past decade, and they have upgraded their theatres to cater for the changing needs and preferences of their audiences, offering not only films but other events and inventive programming such as event cinema, ‘virtual reality’ and four-dimensional (4D) experiences. Data show that European exhibitors have invested €1.5 billion in digital cinema in the past decade, with the number of films having doubled in the past 15 years and developments including new theatre designs, extra-large screens and ground-breaking technologies, which are complemented by a change in the cinema experience itself (UNIC 2017). It is usually multiplex cinemas that more easily make this kind of high-cost investment, and cinema operators benefit from better picture quality and projection, global distribution methods and flexible programming (Wutz ­ 2014; De Vinck and Lindmark 2012). De Vinck and Lindmark (2012) argue that digitisation of cinemas could also provide an incentive to include more European films, but as Cabrera et al. (2018: 52) point out, at the end of 2016, just 15 European countries out of 34 were fully digitised. The emergence of Video on Demand (VoD) is important in the development of the film sector as it involves a lot of potential, but it comes with the

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

211

need to acquire and develop new skills, as well as with new financial implications (European Commission 2014). Video on Demand takes place online, which not only impacts on costs and delivery but essentially creates a ‘userdriven’ interaction, where consumer choice dictates time and location of viewing (De Vinck and Lindmark 2012). Significant costs are borne by operators in making films available on VoD platforms, such as encoding and preparing new language versions, as well as providing new promotional tools and ancillary promotional activities once the films are accessible. These can be recovered, but only after a large number of viewings and a long period of time (European Commission 2014). According to Wutz (2014), the VoD sector can provide an opportunity for non-mainstream films which are not successful in cinema exhibition, as well as provide a vehicle to combat the illegal downloading of films, promote European film and generate profit for the industry. De Vinck and Lindmark (2012: 95) see the development of digital technology and the cost reductions and flexibility it entails as an opportunity for the European film industry, as it enables distributors to consider investing in the type of non-mainstream movies to which a lot of non-national European films belong. Digitisation of the film landscape, they argue, is a complex process involving interactions between technology, sociocultural factors, economic decisions and political and regulatory frameworks, and it affects production with reference to processes, working relationships, costs and financing, and also content itself. Between 2007 and 2016, film production in Europe increased by 47% with mostly national productions, co-productions and documentaries increasing— the latter almost doubling, with the top five producing countries accounting for 53.6% of production (Talavera Milla 2017: 16). Between 2012 and 2016, there were on average 1650 films produced in the EU annually, but less than half of European films released in theatres were also released on VoD in the EU (European Audiovisual Observatory 2017). The 2017 cinema admissions data demonstrates an increase of 1.7% in box office revenue from 2016 to a total of €8.6 billion, and an increase of 2.5% in visits to the cinema in 2016 with the total number of visits to 1.34 billion that year (UNIC 2018: 5). A recent European Audiovisual Observatory report (Cabrera et  al. 2018) provides a long analysis of the European audiovisual sector and identifies the latest trends. These include the rise of video consumption, time-shifted television (TV) consumption and the emergence of new content formats. Catch-up TV and online simulcasts are also increasingly connected to television viewing. According to this report, the European audiovisual sector includes 4208 ­television services and 2270 on-demand audiovisual services, with half of the television services concentrated in France, Germany, Italy and the UK. There seems to be a rise in TV fiction production in both short and long formats, with approximately 920 titles with over 16,400 episodes and more than 11,000 hours of content. TV films of one to two episodes comprised 44% of all titles in 2015 and 2016; 90% of the TV fiction production is up to 26 episodes, and the other 10% are long format, of 26 or more episodes (Cabrera et al. 2018: 12).

212 

O. KOLOKYTHA

The European Audiovisual Observatory (2017) identifies the ‘cultural versus commercial’ aspect of film as also associated with new ways of creating and consuming content. As Wutz (2014) argues, physical distribution is declining and downloads of films are increasing. In addition to that, new players such as Instagram and video games software providers are coming to the fore, changing the notion of content. Content is also now not regarded in the same way by audiences who can ‘binge-watch’ not only TV series but also films online, contesting the notion of commercial versus cultural content (European Audiovisual Observatory 2017).

The Northern European Example In the Nordic regions, film is regarded as a means of reflecting and influencing the conditions of the welfare state and the shaping of collective identities, and Hjort and Lindqvist (2016: 15–16) identify two parameters that are consistently part of the particular relationship that Nordic countries have with film: the first is the importance of safeguarding filmmaking as a local activity that can encourage cultural expression and the expression of collective identities. The second, long-standing, parameter sees film audiences as citizens, and therefore sees film as a way to engage citizens in society, thereby having a political and social effect on society. Geographical decentralisation has been discussed by Mangset (1998) with reference to Norwegian cultural policy after World War II, an objective of which was to democratise cultural life and ensure people all over the country had access to the arts—which, in turn, implied the decentralisation of artists to places outside the capital, Oslo. Since the 1970s, there have been cultural policy attempts to decentralise cultural institutions, but there is no evidence to support the idea that decentralisation is mirrored in corresponding changes in the location of artists. As Mangset (1998) argues, artists need both artistic and alternative labour markets to survive, and Norway, as with other Nordic countries, has constructed a very good state grant system for artists. The geographic mobility of artists is related to cultural policy measures, with different measures impacting in different ways, but geographic distribution of artists is influenced also by factors such as housing prices and art education locations, among others (Mangset 1998). According to Sand (2018), Norway has a long interest in regional development and policies, and the even spread of the population across the country, in addition to the welfare and prosperity of regional populations, have been central targets for the government. Norwegian film production is heavily subsidised, as the author argues (Sand 2018: 86), which means that the government can directly influence the industry through policy and financial means. Norwegian film policy stresses that films should be produced all over the country; the regionalisation of Norwegian film policy is part of a government strategy which stresses the contributions of the regions themselves towards regional development (Sand 2017).

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

213

Public funding of regional film is based on the creative industries’ discourse and principles that see film as an economic good (Sand 2017), and despite financial cuts to public funding in Europe, public funding of regional film increased in the period between 2005 and 2009. According to Sand (2018: 91–92), Norway increased film subsidies until 2013, when a change in government took place, with currently seven regional film centres in Norway supported by the central government, as long as they contribute to developing local talent, increasing interest in film locally, developing competence and entrepreneurship, and contributing to regional development. The tension identified here by the author (Sand 2018) is whether regional filmmaking is primarily important within a regional framework because of its economic contribution to Norwegian film or whether it can be artistically equal to filmmaking taking place in the capital. The example of Sweden is particular among the Nordic regions, as film production is decentralised to a great extent and Stockholm is no longer the country’s primary production hub (Sand 2017). In the early 1990s, Stockholm was the main production site for Swedish films and film production was centralised, but by the early 2000s fewer than half of Swedish films were produced in Stockholm (Dahlström and Hermelin 2007: 111). Sand (2017) identifies two reasons for the regionalisation of Swedish film: on the one hand, the increased autonomy of the regions as a result of the diminishing of power of the national state; on the other, as a result of the turn of Swedish film policy to the economic importance, potential and return of film, which made investment in regional film production attractive for the regions. Dahlström and Hermelin (2007) highlight the development of the cultural and creative industries discourse in Sweden and its view of the relationship of regional policy to economic growth. For them, decentralisation is a combination of top-down/ national and bottom-up/regional policies, film competence at regional and local levels, and entrepreneurship; regional film policy is part of a wider regional development policy which includes culture, but also, and more importantly, economic development. According to Hedling (2016: 71–72), data shows that during the period 2000–2009, Swedish film demonstrated unprecedented growth with reference to both the number of films produced in the country and the percentage of the theatrical market held, developments which are attributed to the contribution of regional funding, the increase in co-productions, the development of the DVD and the co-financing of films by television after the deregulation of Swedish TV in 1998. Regional filmmaking took place in Sweden at a moment when the regional turn offered opportunities for funding and for new talent; it added energy to Swedish film and highlighted the importance of the audiovisual sector to the Swedish economy (Hedling 2016). However, as Sand highlights (2017), although film production is decentralised, film workers’ mobility is not the same as that of productions, with most of them still based in Stockholm, albeit periodically working on projects in the regions.

214 

O. KOLOKYTHA

New challenges in the film landscape in Norway include, as Jakob Kirstein Høgel argues (Nordisk Film & TV Fond 2015), understanding that the new developments in film do not imply a rejection of cinema, but are more a diversification of it, and that they are related to both technological advancement and consumption. What we consider as film now exists in different formats and expressions, in video games, series, and webisodes, and is circulated via Internet and social media. Despite the fact that the boundaries of the term have become more fluid, and it is not exhibited in celluloid only, film is still present but now includes other audiovisual forms as well (Jakob Kirstein Høgel in Nordisk Film & TV Fond 2015). As nowadays film has become independent of physical location and as the Internet has shifted from text- to audiovisual-oriented, the ways the audience relates to it and consumes it are bound to change (Johanna Koljonen in Nordisk Film & TV Fond 2015).

The Case of Greece In Greece, a state funding system for film was only introduced in the 1980s with Law 1597/1986 on the Protection and Development of the Art of Film, a reproduction of systems already in place in other European countries (Papadimitriou 2017). The Law gave full creative control to the director/auteur and led to the making of films that did not appeal to the public (Papadimitriou 2018); although films were generously supported by the state, they did not manage to attract international attention (Karalis 2012 in Papadimitriou 2017). Greek film policy remains a strange affair mainly because of the lack of a systematic, long-term view of cultural policy from any Greek government after 1974. The attitude of the Greek State to film and, by extension, the Greek legal film framework, is extremely complicated. According to Kontou (2012: 88), by 2009 there were approximately 1200 pages in Greek legislation referring to film, spread across 297 laws and presidential decrees. The growth of the Greek economy in the 1990s and the 2000s is mirrored in the audiovisual sector, with the establishment of production companies specialising in TV series and advertisements, and the investment of exhibition companies in production (Papadimitriou 2018). In the 1990s, Greek television was deregulated and the funding regulations of the Greek Film Centre changed, placing emphasis on co-productions with private or state organisations, mostly TV channels—either the public service broadcaster (ERT) or private ones. As Papadimitriou argues (2018), the involvement of private television networks enabled the re-establishment of Greek film as a category after a long time. Funding came from public and private funds as well as European co-production funds, and there were plenty of opportunities for filmmakers to find work in the television industry, gain experience, develop artistically and professionally, and finance their films (Papadimitriou 2018; Karalis 2012). Although a number of films were made outside Athens in the early days of Greek cinema, Athens remained the dominant production centre throughout the twentieth century, a fact which was facilitated by a bureaucratic, centralist state, and

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

215

which resulted in a limited visual history of the country—one that ignored the periphery and regional particularities of the country (Karalis 2012). During the 2000s, Greek cinema not only became popular again among audiences and films became profitable, but it also benefited from the professional services and increased technical mastery of those working in the sector (Papadimitriou 2014). Filmmakers appear to use television techniques, particularly in the comedies of the late 1990s, and a lot of films of that era are reminiscent of television programmes, advertisements or music videos (Karalis 2012). It is this media landscape that enabled the restructure and development of Greek film later, during the crisis (Papadimitriou 2015). Around the same time the crisis was emerging, Greek cinema made a significant turn, with Greek films attracting attention at international film festivals (Papadimitriou 2018), and it was then that the term Weird Wave emerged. Papadimitriou (2014) provides a discussion of the term, introduced by Anglophone critics to characterise films with ‘weird’ imagery and dialogue, and distinct aesthetics, although Greek critics use other terms, namely New Greek Current and Young Greek Cinema, which she views as more inclusive and denoting the break from past patterns. Examples of filmmakers who belong to the Greek Weird Wave include Lanthimos, Tsangari, Koutras, Tsitos, Avranas and Papadimitropoulos, and films such as Dogtooth (2009), Attenberg (2010), Miss Violence (2013), Xenia (2014), Chevalier (2015) and Suntan (2016), among others. A common characteristic of the films of that period is their production practices, which are characterised by solidarity as a way of overcoming financial and institutional difficulties (Papadimitriou 2014). Although, as Papadimitriou (2014) argues, there is no direct relation between the crisis and Dogtooth, the first example of the Greek Weird Wave, it does not seem to be a coincidence that Greek Weird Wave films emerged during the crisis. One of the results of the crisis is that it inspired reflection on societal principles as well as questioning and challenging the fundamental triptych of traditional Greek values—homeland, religion and family. This is reflected in the films, which provide a means to articulate and express this experience.

The Impact of the Crisis The Greek crisis emerged around 2009 as a result of multiple factors: as an effect of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, particularities of the Greek economy as part of the Eurozone and the misreporting of Greek debt by the government. In 2010 the country had to ask for help from the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund to avoid default, thus endangering the whole Eurozone structure. Originally financial, the still-ongoing crisis led to severe austerity measures, budget cuts, heavy taxation, extreme unemployment, an unprecedented brain drain and the migration of approximately half a million people during the period 2008–2016,2 and an extremely bad image of the country and its people in the international

216 

O. KOLOKYTHA

media. It has led to a profound social and institutional crisis causing instability and upheaval, but also a wave of solidarity throughout social structures. Culture was among the first areas to suffer in the crisis, and the Greek film industry has been strongly affected: box office receipts went down almost 50% from 2009 to 2014, triggering a snowball effect in the rest of the industry (Papadimitriou 2017: 168). That period is marked by a shrinking of the Greek film market, almost no private distributor investment, severe problems in State funding, structural changes in the Greek Film Centre and the closing of the Greek public service broadcaster (ERT) in June 2013, which was the second state funding source for Greek film (Papadimitriou 2017). The period 2010–2015 was the worst and was marked with challenges for Greek filmmakers. Some of them, such as Lanthimos, relocated abroad, but most tried to find alternative means to overcome increasing difficulties (Papadimitriou 2017: 169). During the crisis, many film industry technical staff were pushed to seek work in other, non-film sectors in order to survive. The crisis may have led to financial turbulence and social upheaval, but it has also boosted creativity and alternative ways of culture making, and has promoted solidarity and the development of networks. Kourelou et  al. (2014) argue the crisis has created a standpoint from which to see artistic activity from inside and outside of the country, and facilitated a reformation of the framework of Greek film, which has ultimately benefited from changes in funding and artistic creation. Papadimitriou (2017) argues that a turn to ‘extroversion’ in the sense of reaching out for transnational co-production partners, solidarity, and crowdfunding emerged as a result of lack of national financing, as well as of shifts in attitudes and technological advancements, and these demonstrate a change in financing culture as a result of shrinking public and private resources. Developments in the film sector included a turn in filmmaking to practices grounded in solidarity, sharing resources and support to deal with financial and institutional issues, as well as an increasing turn to European coproductions for financial resources and visibility in international festivals and markets (Papadimitriou 2018). Crowdfunding was another response of filmmakers to the crisis, who turned to audiences and online communities for funding. According to Papadimitriou (2017), Greek filmmakers started collaborating and participating in each other’s projects in different capacities in the form of an exchange of labour such as acting in or producing each other’s works to overcome the significant lack of financial resources and be able to realise their films. Tsangari herself says (Tsangari Interview 2016) that these practices of filmmaking provided a means of advancing the impeccable work ethos, ­professional practices, commitment and solidarity of those working in the Greek film sector, as well as highlighting qualities such as inventiveness and intuition. The crisis also steered a twofold shift in the attitudes of filmmakers: on the one hand towards funding, which now comes from both public and private sources and sometimes also, as in the case of Dogtooth, advertising companies that support artistic work rather than having a profit-oriented agenda;

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

217

on the other, towards artistic vision and the investment of work and money, which leads to making films without waiting for public funding that might never come, and without expectations of profit (Papadimitriou 2015). Continuous technological changes are a reality in the audiovisual sector. Feature film formats depend on technological developments, and synergies between film and other media products play a paramount role in the direction formats will take. Because of globalisation and despite the crisis, Greece is not left out of technological convergence, whose effects need to be observed in order to understand the future course of filmmaking (Papadimitriou 2014). Technological advancements and the opportunities they offered facilitated the emergence of new distribution channels in digital media, which, in turn, led to a shift to project work and a view of non-traditional film content through the lens of film. Moves to the periphery have, during the crisis, become reality for part of the general Greek workforce, as living conditions tend to be better than in the big urban centres. In the domain of film, there are currently production companies, although very few, active in the periphery of the country by choice, such as Indigo View,3 which produces content in a variety of formats but always with a ‘film-oriented rationale’ and cinematic quality, and whose broad portfolio helps in sustaining people professionally. Greek cinematographers work in TV, which now appears to dominate the sector, and are producing work with more cinematic qualities. The crisis has broadened the need for co-productions and, thus, made themes and storytelling more international. The recent establishment of regional film offices is another sign of decentralisation—one, however, that explicitly links film with tourism and originates from financial reasons, with the aim of attracting funds to the country specifically within the framework of the ongoing crisis, rather than as a result of a film policy and strategy. The first regional film office was launched in the Region of Central Greece in summer 2016 and has already supported four film productions,4 with other film offices planned for the remaining regions in 2019.5 The Region of Central Macedonia has already established a film office providing detailed information for those interested in filming in the region.6 The adoption of a new Law 4487/2017 for the production of audiovisual works has introduced a cash rebate of 35% on eligible expenses incurred in Greece for national and international productions that choose Greece as a location, aiming to support the film sector and attract productions from abroad.7

Case Study: Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010) Attenberg (2010) is an award-winning Greek drama film written, directed and produced by Athena Rachel Tsangari. The film received numerous awards, such as the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress for Ariane Labed and the Lina Mangiacarpe Award for Tsangari, both at the Venice Film Festival. It was also recipient of the Silver Alexander at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival,

218 

O. KOLOKYTHA

Fig. 12.1  Marina and Bella, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films)

the Best Director award at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, among others, and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The film was proclaimed the highlight of the 2011 New Directors/New Films Festival in New York and one of the Greek movies that have drawn attention nationally and internationally (Dargis 2011  in Tsangari Interview 2016). Its title is a paraphrase of the name of Sir David Attenborough, who, along with his nature documentaries, inspired the film’s title (Tsangari Interview 2016), and references to animal movements and ritualistic dances are also made by characters in the film (Papadimitriou 2015) (Fig. 12.1). The main character is Marina, a 23-year-old woman who lives with her father, ill with cancer. Her father Spyros is an architect and was among those who designed the town they both live in. Marina watches Attenborough’s documentaries and then mimics the animals. She is sexually inexperienced, whereas her friend Bella is a sexually active woman. She and Bella are two young women who are outsiders in the society they live in. Papadimitriou (2015) identifies the key themes of Attenberg as the death of the protagonist’s father and Marina’s sexual inexperience. Attenberg belongs to those Greek films that received acclaim first outside Greece before being known and appreciated inside the country and, like Dogtooth, is not seen in Greece as a representative example of Greekness (Papadimitriou 2015). A common element that Karalis (2012) sees in Attenberg and Dogtooth is the reference to family—a very traditional and fundamental value in Greek society. However, according to Karalis

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

219

(2012), the film captures the darker and more disturbing side of the contemporary family, which is a characteristic of many Greek films during the past decade. Attenberg functions as an example of the type of solidarity among filmmakers mentioned earlier in the chapter—the practice of mobilising assistance and collaboration at various levels to facilitate the making of films. Tsangari initiated synergies and collaborations with other filmmakers, opening the way to means of production that would make it easier for them to create the kind of films they wanted to make. These were not only based on communication and shared beliefs but also a response to the endless bureaucracy and slow pace of the Greek State in the domain of culture; they were also facilitated by the advancement of technology and subsequent changes such as cheaper filming and less expensive labour costs, as well as the importance of informal network development (Tsangari Interview 2016). As Tsangari says “I discovered that every interest of mine—music, literature, politics, art, architecture, theatre— fell into the purview of cinema. And this kind of cinema was not unattainable, it could be made collectively and produced collectively by us, and not by a powerful group of men over sixty as had been my impression in Greece” (Tsangari Interview 2016: 240). As Tsangari says (Tsangari Interview 2016), it was important for Attenberg to find and secure distribution, towards which a strong festival presence, good reviews and positive word of mouth always count. Distributors, as the director herself notes, do not choose this kind of film on financial criteria, but rather because they wish to disseminate a kind of cinema that is, arguably, slowly becoming obsolete. The film was produced by Haos Films, Faliro House Productions, Boo Productions and Stefi S.A. and supported by the Greek Film Centre and the European Union MEDIA programme. The production started after the financial crisis had emerged, and as the producers were not able to access the funding originally allocated to the film by the Greek Film Centre, Tsangari involved independent producer Faliro House, a company oriented towards financing productions that can appeal to an international audience, in order to cover those costs (Papadimitriou 2015). Haos productions was initially a student production company that Tsangari and Matt Johnson, writer and editor, had founded while in the US (Papadimitriou 2015). The company produced Lanthimos’ first feature film, Kinetta (2005), with Lanthimos later acting in Attenberg. According to Papadimitriou (2015), the ethos of Haos is more of a cooperative; its members do not have fixed roles but are more flexible and contribute to production in different ways, and even the name, reminiscent of both ‘chaos’ and ‘house’, was chosen to reflect a way of working that is informal, unstructured and hands-on. All its productions involve co-producers who contribute part of the capital and services in deferral, therefore highlighting their investment in the artistic and intrinsic value of the film, rather than its chances of making profit (Papadimitriou 2015: 128).

220 

O. KOLOKYTHA

Attenberg was shot in Aspra Spitia, a place where Tsangari spent the first years of her life and many of her summers, and it was in that exact place where Tsangari’s father got his first job.8 The location, designed in the 1960s and used by a company to house workers, is important to Tsangari not only for sentimental reasons but also because it is a reference to the protagonist’s father, an architect who is dying (Papadimitriou 2015). Additionally, Tsangari notes its practical use as a confined space resembling a theatre stage, an art form that she has followed closely, allowing her to concentrate and not spend energy in changing locations (Tsangari Interview 2016) (Fig. 12.2). “I have always felt a part of this generation that took cinema in its hands and expressed the ennui and resistance of its times” notes Tsangari (Tsangari Interview 2016: 240). As Papadimitriou argues (2015), in both Dogtooth and Attenberg, their filmmakers have not made artistic compromises because of lack of funding, but have rather chosen to work around solutions that would allow them to realise their vision. Such synergies created new methods of funding and directing, and collaborative ways of producing that stretch beyond fi ­ nancial parameters, with people sometimes working voluntarily and for free. According to Tsangari (Tsangari Interview 2016), the crisis has been a lever that has made Greek filmmakers develop beyond past narratives and present another image than that of a decadent society in decline.

Fig. 12.2  Marina and her father, Attenberg (2010). (Courtesy of Haos Films)

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

221

Conclusion Viewing film as both a cultural and industrial good, this chapter discussed the effects of technology in the film industry and the developments in filmmaking and production with a focus on two entirely different, in their view of film, areas in the periphery of Europe. The impact of technology and digitisation is visible in new trends and practices such as the emergence of new content and different distribution channels and the upgrade of cinema theatres. In the northern and southern regions of Europe, there seems to be a turn towards decentralisation of film. Decentralisation is seen as having three different strands: one is decentralisation in geographic terms; the second is the more fluid perception of film as a form which is no longer only exhibited on theatrical screens, but created for and consumed in different formats; and the third is the shift to less standardised production methods. In the north of Europe, decentralisation comes as a result of a combination of two factors: long-term, strategic cultural policies stemming from principles of cultural democracy that see film as a ‘good’ for citizens and film policy belonging to a wider social policy framework, and the creative industries’ rationale that sees culture as a tool for regional growth. This has been facilitated by technological progress that allows a more fluid perception of film as a form not restricted to theatrical exhibition, enabling a fresh view, reconceptualisation and development of the field. While in Northern Europe decentralisation stems from regional policy and entrepreneurship, in the South, it seems to be a resource-based decision that comes as a response to the manifold effects of the crisis. Geographic decentralisation can be seen as more a matter of personal choice and quality of life as a result of the crisis, as well as stemming from financial reasons such as the introduction of the regional film offices in Greece. Despite its explicit negative effects such as the lack of State support and financial resources, the crisis has also impacted in a positive way on the film sector in Greece, challenging both structures and perceptions of film, and leading to the rise of a new wave of film production. The lack of funding has made filmmakers turn to other forms as a means of cultural expression, but also to alternative ways of filmmaking based on solidarity. As Papadimitriou notes, “a focus on the small and the peripheral is crucial for an understanding of both local and global production funding cultures, as it enables both culturally specific and more generic insights into specific funding practices and options. Furthermore, if the democratic and utopian potential of the digital revolution is to be (at least partly) enabled, small, marginalized voices need to be heard” (Papadimitriou 2017: 166). Sand (2018) argues that although film has been seen as a lever for regional development and research demonstrates that regional film production works positively towards film diversity, and despite the fact that regional film funds have multiplied, there is little research so far on regional film policy and production and the ways those

222 

O. KOLOKYTHA

involved in filmmaking react to the different financial, political and institutional systems. This chapter offers a view of the issues and tensions that film is currently facing in the North-South European regions: standing between economic considerations and technological developments, as well as cultural objectives and production of culture, the new challenges for filmmakers and the art form are still to be seen.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. How do you see the political interests of, and policy interventions from, supranational institutions as affecting the domain of European film? 2. On supranational level, how is the importance of European film demonstrated in the relevant policy documents, for example, the 1992 Convention on Cinematographic Co-production? 3. What has the influence of the Greek crisis been on the film industry? How has it changed the existing structures of film, and what impact does it have on filmmakers? 4. In what way have technological developments affected and influenced European film? 5. What differences can you identify in cultural policy in film between Northern and Southern Europe? 6. What do you think will be the new challenges for European film? How could international co-productions influence regional film? 7. How do you think changes in ‘content’ production can affect film funding? Acknowledgements  The author thanks Ioanna Davi for the interesting conversation which provided inspiration that led to meaningful sources of information related to this chapter.

Notes 1. See also the Guardian article that was among the first to make reference to the term here https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/attenbergdogtooth-greece-cinema. 2. For more, see https://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/03/08/brain-drain450000-greeks-left-the-country-in-past-8-years/. 3. See https://www.indigoview.com/. 4. See https://filmincentralgreece.com/en/. 5. See https://www.ekome.media/el/film-offices/se-amesi-efarmogi-to-ergo-toyekome-gia-ti-leitoyrgia-ton-film-offices-stin-ellada/ (in Greek). 6. See http://www.pkm.gov.gr/default.aspx?lang=el-GR&page=903). 7. For more, see https://www.ekome.media/cash-rebate-greece/. 8. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlCiOjkCAb8.

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

223

References Athina Rachel Tsangari Interview. 2016. On Solidarity, Collaboration and Independence: Athina Rachel Tsangari Discusses Her Films and Greek Cinema with Vangelis Calotychos, Lydia Papadimitriou and Yannis Tzioumakis. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 2 (2): 237–253. Bergfelder, Tim. 2005. National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies. Media, Culture & Society 27 (3): 315–331. Bondebjerg, Ib. 2016. Regional and Global Dimensions of Danish Film Culture and Film Policy. In A Companion to Nordic Cinema, ed. Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist, 19–40. London: Wiley Blackwell. Cabrera, Francesco, Gilles Fontaine, Christian Grece, Marta Jimenez Pumares, Martin Kanzler, Ismail Rabie, Agnes Schneeberger, Patrizia Simone, Julio Talavera, and Sophie Valais. 2018. Yearbook 2017/2018. Key Trends. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory. Calotychos, Vangelis, Lydia Papadimitriou, and Yannis Tzoumakis. 2016. Revisiting Contemporary Greek Film Cultures: Weird Wave and Beyond. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 2 (2): 127–131. Council of Europe. 1992. Convention on Cinematographic Co-production (Revised). https://www.ifa.de/fileadmin/pdf/abk/inter/ec_ets_147.pdf. Accessed 29 October 2018. Dahlström, Margareta, and Brita Hermelin. 2007. Creative Industries, Spatiality and Flexibility: The Example of Film Production. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography 61 (3): 111–121. De Vinck, Sophie, and Sven Lindmark. 2012. Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries: The Film Sector. Luxembourg: European Union Publications Office. Department of Culture, Media and Sports – DCMS. 2001. Creative Industries Mapping Document. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183544/2001part1-foreword2001.pdf. Accessed 28 October 2018. European Audiovisual Observatory. 2017. The Financial Ecosystem of the European Audiovisual Production. Summary of the EAO Workshop, Strasbourg, 8 December 2017. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory. European Commission. 2011. Green Paper on the Online Distribution of Audiovisual Works in the European Union: Opportunities and Challenges Towards a Digital Single Market. https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/7ec 0fa4a-3983-4b25-881e-4add98b3057c/language-en. Accessed 29 October 2018. ———. 2014. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. European Film in the Digital Era. Bridging Cultural Diversity and Competitiveness. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=C ELEX:52014DC0272&from=EN. Accessed 05 October 2018. European Parliament. 2014. An Overview of Europe’s Film Industry. Briefing. http:// www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2014/545705/EPRS_ BRI(2014)545705_REV1_EN.pdf. Accessed 05 October 2018. Hedling, Olof. 2016. Cinema in the Welfare State. Notes on Public Support, Regional Film Funds, and Swedish Film Policy. In A Companion to Nordic Cinema, ed. Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist, 66–77. London: Wiley Blackwell.

224 

O. KOLOKYTHA

Hjort, Mette, and Ursula Lindqvist. 2016. Introduction. In A Companion to Nordic Cinema, ed. Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist, 15–18. London: Wiley Blackwell. Karalis, Vrasidas. 2012. A History of Greek Cinema. New York: Continuum. Kolokytha, Olga, and Katharine Sarikakis. 2018. Film Governance in the EU: Caught in a Loop? In Handbook of State Aid for Film. Media Business and Innovation, ed. Paul Murschetz, Roland Teichmann, and Matthias Karmasin, 67–82. Cham: Springer. Kontou, Marina E. 2012. Nature and Development of Greek Film Policy. Masters Thesis. http://ikee.lib.auth.gr/record/131428/files/kontou.pdf. Accessed 20 October 2018 (in Greek). Kourelou, Olga, Mariana Liz, and Belén Vidal. 2014. Crisis and Creativity: The New Cinemas of Portugal, Greece and Spain. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 12 (1&2): 133–151. Mangset, Per. 1998. The Artist in Metropolis: Centralisation Processes and Decentralisation in the Artistic Field. International Journal of Cultural Policy 5 (1): 49–74. Nordisk Film & TV Fond. 2015. Nordic Films Crossing Borders. http://www.nordicom.gu.se/sv/aktuellt/nyheter/report-nordic-films-crossing-borders. Accessed 05 November 2018. Papadimitriou, Lydia. 2014. Locating Contemporary Greek Film Cultures: Past, Present, Future and the Crisis. FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, no. 2. http://filmiconjournal.com/journal/article/2014/2/2. Accessed 28 October 2018. ———. 2015. In the Shadow of the Studios, the State and the Multiplexes: Independent Filmmaking in Greece. In The Meaning of Independence: Independent Filmmaking Around the Globe, ed. Mary Erickson and Doris Baltruschat, 113–130. Toronto: Toronto University Press. ———. 2017. Transitions in the Periphery: Funding Film Production in Greece since the Financial Crisis. International Journal on Media Management 19 (2): 164–181. ———. 2018. Greek Cinema as European Cinema: Coproductions, Eurimages and the Europeanisation of Greek Cinema. Studies in European Cinema 15 (2–3): 215–234. Sand, Stine. 2017. Voices from the Peripheries: A Study of the Regional Film and Television Business in Norway. Doctoral Dissertation. https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2455048/PhD9_Sand_til_nett.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 08 October 2018. ———. 2018. Supporting ‘Film Cultural Peripheries’? The Dilemmas of Regional Film Policy in Norway. International Journal of Cultural Policy 24 (1): 85–102. Serra, Francesca. 2014. Film Production Incentives in Europe: Who Is the Most “Ciak” Appealing? Filmstøtte i Europa. Master Thesis. http://studenttheses.cbs.dk/bitstream/handle/10417/4642/francesca_serra.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 20 October 2018. Talavera Milla, Julio. 2017. Film Production in Europe  – Production Volume, Co-production and Worldwide Circulation. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory.

12  TECHNOLOGY, DECENTRALISATION AND THE PERIPHERY OF EUROPEAN… 

225

UNIC (International Union of Cinemas). 2017. Innovation and the Big Screen. https:// www.unic-cinemas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/wordpress-uploads/2017/01/ UNIC_Innovation_web-1.pdf. Accessed 20 October 2018. ———. 2018. Annual Report. https://www.unic-cinemas.org/fileadmin/user_ upload/wordpress-uploads/2017/06/UNIC_AR2018_online.pdf. Accessed 20 October 2018. Wutz, Josef. 2014. Dissemination of European Cinema in the European Union and the International Market. France: Jacques Delors Institute. http://institutdelors.eu/ wp-content/uploads/2018/01/disseminationeuropeanfilm-wutzperez-ne-jdi-ifaunifr-nov14.pdf. Accessed 06 October 2018.

CHAPTER 13

Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean: The International and Transnational in Irish Cinema Maria O’Brien and Laura Canning

Definitions Celtic Tiger Referring to the 1990s–2000s period of rapid Irish economic growth, the term is a play on the term ‘Asian Tiger’ used to describe economic growth in Asia. During this period, the Irish economy grew from one of the poorest in Western Europe to one of the richest. Marked by over-reliance on foreign investment, a rapidly expanding banking sector, unstable property market, and unlimited access to cheap credit, the boom ended in 2007/08 with an economic crash, part of a wider recession throughout Europe (see Kirby et al. 2002). Diaspora Most simply, the term refers to the dispersion or spread of a people from their homeland. The rise in self-identified diasporic groups in recent times has been linked to various causes, including improved modes of

M. O’Brien (*) Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] L. Canning School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, Penryn, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_13

227

228 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

communication, transportation, and increased movement of peoples. The term often implies a desire to return to the homeland, and the recognition of a diasporic community can be seen to empower a group that may otherwise be marginalised. Heritage Film A critical term describing a diverse range of texts representing historical nostalgia, romantic costume films, or historical drama. Primarily associated with the British heritage film, the term evokes a form of cultural nationalism and, in the British context, generally represents a traditional upper-class privileged society. The heritage film is problematised by issues of cultural diversity, lack of representativeness, and reinventions of past events (see Higson 2003).

Introduction Film in Ireland, both as an industry and as a cultural product, has been international since its inception. From the making of a number of feature films in Ireland in the 1910s and 1920s by the American studio company The Kalem Company (affectionately dubbed the O’Kalems) aimed at the Irish diaspora in the USA to the recent use of UNESCO heritage site Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichíl) as a location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), film production and exhibition cross national boundaries, bringing stories and images of Ireland around the world and creating images of elsewhere in Ireland. Whether filmmakers engage directly with notions of ‘Irishness’, employ Irish landscape and heritage as simple backdrops, or engage Irish production facilities and technical expertise in the production of international narratives, Irish film production illustrates the complexities and paradoxes around producing meaning-making cultural products within a national setting, and operating simultaneously within a globalised industry. This is particularly the case in a nation where a distinctive national industry has struggled to establish itself, caught between the competing dynamics of free-market funding, which privileges ‘entertainment’ and the economic contribution of film, and an implied ‘cultural value’ framework. Thus, the relationship between Ireland and cinema is marked by contradictions and paradoxes: between the commercial and cultural, the global and the local, the national and the transnational. However, rather than perceiving these as oppositional, it is more productive to consider them as interacting with one another. The industry reflects the nature of film production in an Irish context (as in other nations) as part of the cultural industries which operate within a capitalist society, thus complex, ambivalent and marked by contradiction (Miège 1989). Similarly, when the film industry ecology is conceived of as a continuum, rather than in terms of oppositional binaries, we can consider the local within the global, the national within the transnational (and vice versa). This chapter investigates the dynamic at play in this continuum, both in films produced in

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

229

and about Ireland and in the film production landscape that supports such works. It also takes into account that these contexts are problematised by Irish history, geography, and culture. As a diaspora nation at the very Western margin of Europe which retains strong links to the UK and USA, Ireland’s status as an Anglophone—but crucially not Anglophile, given its status as a former British colony—nation means that its mainstream cultural and entertainment traditions have arguably been drawn from British and American influences, and its generic and narrative models for film largely from the Hollywood mode, rather than from European film culture. This chapter, rather than considering the ‘Irishness’ of representations and production contexts, looks to examine how Irishness intersects with, inflects, and engages in dialogue with the international and transnational. The case study, Brooklyn (2015) reveals the international and transnational tensions at play in terms both of production contexts, and thematic and representational issues. While film may be seen as an expression of national culture and identity, performing an important role in “negotiating cultural identity and articulating social consciousness” (Gao 2009: 423), the globalised relationship between capital and creativity can create multiple—sometimes competing, sometimes intersecting—visions of Ireland from within and without the nation. This is particularly evident in regard to films which engage with the diasporic nature of Irish society, whether in terms of second- and third-­ generation Irish filmmakers engaging with their heritage (The Guard, Calvary), Irish filmmakers telling stories which mobilise Irish history for both Irish and diasporic-origin audiences worldwide (Black ’47), or Irish filmmakers moving internationally in a career trajectory which sees them ‘transcending’ Irishness (as in the work of Lenny Abrahamson).

Twentieth-Century Film Production A brief history of the film production landscape in Ireland illustrates the importance of the relationship with other jurisdictions, particularly the USA and UK. For a number of reasons, Ireland had no indigenous film industry of note (with some few, but significant, individual exceptions) until the latter part of the twentieth century. While films were produced in Ireland, they were, for the most part, the product of foreign finance and expertise. The Film Company of Ireland was set up in 1916, and per Rockett (2012), “the 1910s was the most productive decade for indigenous Irish film production until the 1970s”. However, a number of different factors, including small box office returns in Ireland, the fragility of the post-independence economy, and the conservative attitude of the Irish government towards the medium of cinema, meant that an indigenous cinema was not established in Ireland (Rockett 2012; Holohan 2009; Condon 2008; Hill 2006). As such, Ireland was represented on-screen between 1920 and 1970 primarily in international productions that originated outside Ireland; while some of the films made in this time were highly influential representations of Ireland, these were mediated through outside eyes, and

230 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) and John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) are both problematic, in their own ways, in their depiction of Irish life. The following decades saw some attempts to encourage the film industry in Ireland, including the establishment in 1958 of Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co. Wicklow, explicitly intended to attract inward investment. However, while Ireland continued to attract both Hollywood and British productions, interventions in support for the film industry did not necessarily translate to support for an indigenous Irish cinema. Several early reports for the Irish government made proposals to imagine and establish an Irish cinema, including the 1942 Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Film Industry (Flynn 2007) and the 1968 Huston Report,1 as it was colloquially termed. The Huston Report (led by Hollywood director John Huston, then resident in Ireland) proposed measures to support both an industry for inward investment productions (such as the already established Hollywood and British productions in Ireland) and an Irish film industry, reflecting Irish stories. The Report recommended the establishment of a Film Board, the provision of training and production facilities, and a National Film Archive, but its recommendations were not acted upon. It was only with the establishment of the Irish Film Board in 1982 that indigenous production flourished, and its axing in 1987 was a blow to the industry. Its re-establishment in 1993, led by the then Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins, led to significant increases in indigenous production during the 1990s. The dual objectives of support for the film industry in Ireland—to encourage indigenous production and simultaneously support inward investment productions—are recognised in the legislation (The Irish Film Board Act, 1980) establishing the Irish Film Board: to “assist and encourage … the making of films in the State and the development of an industry in the State for the making of films” (Section 4(1) 1980 Act). The reinstatement of the Board in 1993 was a sign of support for indigenous film, and can be seen as an attempt to integrate the requirements of both commercial industry and indigenous film culture.

State Supports, European Union Funding, and Indigenous Production Ireland’s film industry policy has historically been marked by the knowledge that a small island nation is unlikely to be able to construct and support an indigenous industry. The notion of ‘market failure’—that under some circumstances the free market will not efficiently produce certain goods and services— is used as a justification of publicly funded state support of the film industry on both cultural and industrial grounds. The commodification of the cultural industries sees an increasing reliance on such industries to fulfil non-cultural goals. This process, known as instrumentalism, means the tendency “to use cultural venues and investments as a means or instrument to attain goals in other areas” (Vestheim 1994: 65), with the “attachment” (Gray 2002: 80) of

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

231

the interests of other non-cultural policy areas to cultural policy. It can be argued that an increasing instrumentalisation of culture within the Irish policy context has led to a contemporary over-reliance on purely economic grounds to justify state support of film production, although the history of state policy illustrates that such support has always been justified on both economic/industrial and cultural grounds. Recent policy developments around the Creative Ireland framework, including the publication of the Audiovisual Action Plan in 2018 (DCHG 2018), offer various proposals to enhance the economic value of the audiovisual industries, without explicitly engaging with the cultural value of such (see O’Brien 2019). The other significant mechanism in developing the Irish industry was the introduction of film tax expenditure aids, designed to make Ireland an attractive location for international audiovisual production.2 Initially introduced by way of Section 35 of the Finance Act 1987 (contemporaneously with the abolition of the ‘first’ Irish Film Board), and now known as Section 481 relief (after the section in the Taxes Consolidation Act), the tax expenditure initially required 75 per cent of production to take place in Ireland in order to qualify for the relief, although this requirement was later removed. State support of national cinemas attempts to foster cultural diversity through enabling support of film industry structures. However, in Ireland the tax expenditure regime is not limited to national productions only (and could not be, given the restrictions of European Union [EU] policy which disallows discrimination on national grounds), but is available to all productions, allowing for a tax credit of between 32 per cent and 37 per cent on eligible spend in Ireland. The assumption is that a ‘trickle-down effect’ will benefit a national cinema through support of infrastructure, on-the-job training, and a spillover effect through increased tax take. However, while a vibrant production environment may well encourage the development of a national film industry, the risk is that short-­ term gains for incoming investment production may be at the expense of long-­ term gains for the wider cultural industry in Ireland. Section 481 tax expenditure is explicitly shaped to actively encourage what are known as ‘runaway productions’ (primarily from Hollywood, but also farther afield, e.g. the filming of scenes for Indian blockbuster Ek Tha Tiger [2012] in Dublin). As McLoone (2009) suggests, Irish cinema must ‘live with’ a dominant Hollywood industry. It is the nature of these living arrangements that is of most interest. Film production policy is also subject to influence from outside Ireland’s borders. As a member of the EU, Ireland is subject to regulations affecting the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons within the EU. Individual authorities are not axiomatically free to offer incentives to productions, as these will upset the balance of trade within the EU, and so funding policies towards film industries within member states of the EU are subject to state aid rules. Generally, these rules recognise that while nations are members of the EU, and thus subject to free movement rules, in certain situations, aids to specific industries within their jurisdictions can be justified. It was recognised within the EU that aid to cultural industries may be justified under a cultural rationale, and a cultural exemption was

232 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

introduced under Article 107(3)(d) Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (by way of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993). This further illustrates the dual nature of the audiovisual industries, as both industrial and cultural.

Funding in the Twenty-First Century: Ireland as International Co-production Hub The fortunes of the second Irish Film Board (renamed Screen Ireland/Fís Éireann in 2018) in the post-recession austerity years have varied in accordance with governmental spending retrenchments. From a high point (itself not significant relative to overall production spend across Ireland) of €20 million, the state film funding budget was cut year-on-year from 2008, and only recently returned to pre-recession levels as part of wider proposals extending the remit of Screen Ireland, and recognising its increasingly important role in the area of animation, television, and (potentially) video games. Animation has become increasingly significant, with a range of Irish animation houses, including Brown Bag, Cartoon Saloon, and Boulder Media, producing shows for television internationally, and Cartoon Saloon creating critically noted (if not always commercially successful) features like Song of the Sea (2015) and The Breadwinner (2017). The former draws, in its sound and imagery, on internationally known signifiers of Celtic mythology, including the late nineteenth-­ century Celtic Revival, and the latter displays the increasingly international dimension of Irish film narrative: Nora Twomey’s feature debut is the story of a young girl in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. These shifting fortunes have inevitably affected the Irish production landscape, alongside 2014 revisions to the tax expenditure regime, Section 481, which extended eligible expenditure from European Economic Area cast and crew to those worldwide (see Murphy and O’Brien 2015). Through these revisions, dubbed the ‘Tom Cruise Clause’ by the Irish media,3 the tax expenditure regime is made even more attractive to inward investment productions. Many of these, such as Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship (2017) use Ireland as a production location for ‘universal’ stories (or those of other nations, as with this adaptation of a Jane Austen novella), rather than engaging with Ireland in narrative terms. However, the physical traces of Ireland can be surprisingly difficult to eradicate from the screen. One such example is that of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where scenes from the planet Ahch-To were filmed in 2017 on UNESCO heritage site Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichíl); unable to (physically or digitally) remove the protected puffins from footage, Lucasfilm instead opted to account for their existence by digitally ‘converting’ them to a new species, the Porg.4 Section 481 is part of a wider mosaic of funding, within Ireland and outside. At a national level, Screen Ireland provides support for the full life cycle of a film, from script support to marketing and distribution, under a number of different schemes. In addition, some (relatively limited) funding is available from

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

233

national broadcasters, including RTÉ, TG4, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI). An increasing tendency, in keeping with the international nature of contemporary film production, is for films to be produced as part of a set of international co-productions. Ireland has co-production agreements with a number of jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Luxembourg, and is a party to the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production, covering feature and documentary production. Signed in 1994, and revised in 2017 to take account of changes brought about by digital technology, the Convention sets out the minimum contribution of a territory to gain the benefits of a co-production agreement; countries enter into co-productions to gain access to national funding structures, subsidies, tax expenditures, and a wider distribution market. This proliferation of co-productions is a factor in difficulties in conceiving of large portions of Ireland’s film output in terms of ‘national’ cinema. As Barton (2019: 1) points out, the contemporary Irish co-production is culturally far removed from the much-derided ‘Europudding’ of the twentieth century: “the indigestible outcome of mixing up multiple European funding sources with little or no investment in cultural engagement, and a dilution of the project of building a distinctive national cinema”. And yet, a project like The Lobster (2015)5—co-funded by Greek, French, Dutch, French, and British sources as well as part financed by the Irish Film Board, shot by a Greek director (Yorgos Lanthimos), and filmed on location in Co. Kerry—makes not a single discernible reference to Ireland, although Ruth Barton (2019) infers that Irish audiences may have interpreted it as somehow discursively Irish due to its setting and star (Colin Farrell). Tracy and Flynn (2017: 170) suggest that its position on the cover of the Irish Film Board’s 2016 strategy document indicates “a decisive and permanent shift in the parameters of Irish cinema that acknowledges not only its reliance on co-production but also its deliberate pursuit of stories, markets, and audiences beyond the national.”

Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century Describing it as “a late-flowering national cinema”, Tracy and Flynn (2017: 169) note that “auteur and cultural-studies approaches have dominated readings of Irish film, which has frequently been called upon as a means of critiquing or negotiating key [Irish] social structures such as the Catholic church, family, sexuality, and gender”. However, even towards the end of the twentieth century it had become obvious that considering Irish cinema in purely textual terms risked neglecting the way in which more complex—and in many ways more international or transnational—factors were key. This could be seen both in the turn towards the use of Ireland as a production location for international studios, and in a cycle of ‘Celtic Tiger’ films—often romantic comedies—which sought to represent Ireland, and particularly Dublin, as a cosmopolitan, modern site of international capital and sophisticated social and sexual relations, liberated from the traditionally oppressive Catholic imagination. These include

234 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

indigenous films such as About Adam (2000), Goldfish Memory (2003), and The Stag [aka The Bachelor Weekend] (2013) but also international interventions, like the American Leap Year (2010), which reverses notions of Irish progressiveness—bed-and-breakfast landladies tut at unmarried couples renting a room, trains fail to run on a Sunday, echoing The Quiet Man—in service of a saccharine rom-com narrative. The idea that “contemporary Irish cinema adopts conventions and techniques of the cinematic apparatus and synthesizes them into narrative form, remaining a subsidiary of an international model yet exhibiting clear and distinctive local inflections” (O’Connell 2010: 24) also helps in considering the work of John Carney, whose Once (2006) earned an Academy Award for Best Original Song despite (or perhaps because of) mobilising a somewhat ramshackle, even ‘arthouse’, approach to the musical. With busker characters known simply as ‘Guy’ and ‘Girl’, enacting a slim plot line in which they must decide whether their intense musical connection also signals a romantic one—Guy is mourning the end of a lost relationship; Girl, an Eastern European immigrant, awaits the arrival of her husband and child—the film foregrounds ‘liveness’ in its performance aspects through the musical talents of its leads (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) and emphasises soundtrack over (distinctly lo-fi) image in its appeal. The film speaks strongly of the rich cultural heritage of Irish music, and acts as a kind of nostalgic ‘musical tour’ of a half-vanished Dublin simultaneously familiar to, and distant from, international viewers. Barton (2019) identifies several key trends, along with increasingly globalised production and consumption practices, among which some may have roots in the internationalised nature of Irish film culture and industry: the significance of animation; a dramatic increase in horror films; and an upswing in the audiovisual industry in Northern Ireland, which largely facilitates ‘runaway productions’, including TV series Game of Thrones, 2009–2019, which has catalysed a burgeoning screen tourism industry in NI (for a critique of the role of policy interventions in this context, see Ramsey et al. 2019). Barton also notes the “abandonment of history films” (Barton 2019: 15) during the Celtic Tiger period, with an associated waning of the ‘heritage film’, in which the Irish countryside could be “defined by pastness” (Barton 2019: 117) and which had much in common with Irish Tourist Board (Fáilte Ireland) campaigns designed to persuade tourists that a visit to Ireland was a visit to a country of timeless and ancient beauty, populated by welcoming natives who had no axe to grind with foreigners (particularly the lucrative UK tourist market). (Barton 2019: 116–117)

For Barton, this has been largely replaced by “a series of high-profile history films that revisited the past as a site of trauma” (Barton 2019: 118), crucially made by non-Irish filmmakers, including Peter Mullan (The Magdalene Sisters, 2002), Stephen Frears (Philomena, 2013), Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, 2006, and Jimmy’s Hall, 2014), and Steve McQueen’s acclaimed

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

235

Hunger (2008). Primarily these engage with the trauma of Ireland’s colonial past and its ongoing legacy, or its continuing—and belated—social and political acknowledgement of the institutional abuse wreaked on Irish women and children by the Catholic church. Why non-Irish filmmakers should be so drawn to these stories as a locus of ‘universalised’ trauma is perhaps difficult to fathom, but Barton relates it to their status as English-language stories, and notes that “these films invited global audiences to relate their own personal/national traumas to the Irish stories, while also reassuring them that the events depicted were over and safely in the past, indeed in someone else’s past” (Barton 2019: 118–119). However, changes in Irish funding regimes have also benefited more explicitly Irish films, including ones which dramatise Irish stories for a presumed international—and perhaps implied diasporic—audience. Lance Daly’s Black ’47 (2018), a bleak Western-inflected revenge drama narrativises the Great Famine6 not as a ‘natural disaster’ but by systematically unpacking language, class, and religion as active elements of the structural oppression enacted upon the Irish populace by colonising British forces, Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and complicit local bureaucrats alike. Despite the distinctly Irish nature of the central tragedy, the cast is international; the two central roles are played by Australian actors, Hugo Weaving and James Frecheville, facilitated at least in part by the 2014 revisions to Section 481. Frecheville speaks as Gaeilge (in Irish), for much of the film, which embeds its historical commitments directly into genre-based action, including an action set-piece set around a convoy of grain being escorted, under armed guard, for export to Britain while the starving Irish look on hopelessly. In addition, the funding arrangements include support from Film Fund Luxembourg alongside financing from Screen Ireland and other sources, thus further illustrating the transnational nature of the industry.

Emigration and Transience in Production and Representation The transnational history of film, and the influence of Hollywood over Western cinemas (and particularly in exhibition in Europe), raises fears around American cultural domination and cultural diversity. Such cultural imperialist arguments hold that concentration of ownership and distribution leads to lack of diversity; however, counterarguments point to the complex relationship between Hollywood and other cinemas of the world, and note the European origin of many of its influential directors. The concept of ‘glocalisation’ (Robertson 2012) counters these negative tendencies, aiming to make explicit the heterogenising (as opposed to homogenising) aspects of globalisation, in which the relationship between the local and the global, rather than being one of polarity, with the local as resistance to the global, is imbricated within the global. This argument sees globalisation as “the linking of locales” (Robertson 2012: 200) in which

236 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

[g]lobalisation—in the broadest sense, the compression of the world—has involved and increasingly involves the creation and the incorporation of locality, a process which itself largely shapes, in turn, the compression of the world as a whole. (Robertson 2012: 205)

This echoes Appadurai’s critique of arguments around homogenisation and heterogenisation which ignore the fact that “as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenised in one or another way: this is true of music and housing styles […]” (Appadurai 1996: 32) and of film. While this argument can, clearly, be seen in terms of framing film genre and its indigenisation, it also has resonance when considering the flow of people from Ireland to the USA. While American film has played a dominant role in shaping Irish understanding of cinema in a way that would not have been the case in a country (like France) with a strong tradition of filmmaking distinctively its own, Ireland’s diasporic relationship with America—in 2013 about 33 million Americans, or 10.5 per cent of the population,7 reported Irish ancestry—has contributed to the production of that model of film. This is certainly the case in terms of the history of classical Hollywood’s first- and second-­ generation Irish production talent such as John Ford and John Huston who, as demonstrated earlier, was arguably as significant to Ireland’s production and industry contexts, in championing Irish state investment in film, as he was in representational terms—and may also be the case in terms of contemporary Irish filmmakers like John Carney, John Crowley, and Lenny Abrahamson, who have developed international careers. As Tracy and Flynn note, there is “nothing new in Irish directors traveling to other production contexts … until recently it would have been understood that indigenous Irish cinema functioned as a stepping-stone for ambitious actors and directors” (Tracy and Flynn 2017: 188), including filmmakers like Neil Jordan (Angel, The Crying Game, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, Interview with the Vampire, The Brave One) and Jim Sheridan (In The Name of the Father, In America, Get Rich or Die Tryin’). Their careers “blended local and international narrative paradigms and production contexts” (Tracy and Flynn 2017: 189), often alternating between Irish-themed films and genre-­ based ‘Hollywood’ projects, to slightly disorientating effect. Sheridan’s 2002 emigrant drama In America was followed by Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005), loosely based on the life of and starring American rapper 50 Cent. This creates a sense in which the paradigm of cultural colonisation implied by American film’s domination can be ‘turned back’ on itself; the former film is the story of a family of 1980s Irish immigrants to a tenement community in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the latter a rags-to-riches story which in its own (not entirely convincing) way engages with America’s legacy of systematic structural oppression against its African American community. The career trajectory of a filmmaker like Lenny Abrahamson illustrates what Tracy and Flynn (2017: 190) describe as the ‘de-territorialisation’—following

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

237

from Deleuze and Guattari—of Irish narrative, his films moving progressively away from considerations of Ireland and towards more ‘universal’ stories and settings. His debut feature Adam & Paul (2004) told the story of two Dublin heroin addicts on a picaresque journey around an unmistakably familiar version of the city, and was followed by Garage (2007), a tale of rural Irish loneliness, and What Richard Did (2012), a portrait of youth in exclusive south Dublin, where “the privileges of white, middle-class masculinity are entirely taken for granted” (Ging 2012). By contrast, his following films have been (at least partly) Irish-funded and facilitated through Abrahamson’s long-standing relationship with Element Pictures (producers of The Lobster) but are distinctly ‘international’. Frank (2012) features Irish actors Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson playing American and English characters, and with large portions of the action staged in America. Its success at the Sundance Film Festival also points to the increasing significance of the international festival circuit in promoting Irish cinema, at least for those films which can be seen to have some element of ‘cult’ or ‘indie’ cachet through which to mobilise the circuitry of contemporary festival ‘hype’. His subsequent film Room (2015), although adapted by Irish novelist Emma Donoghue from her own novel, bears no signifiers of Irishness at all: its difficult material (its protagonists are a kidnapped woman and her child born in captivity, confined to a ten-foot by ten-foot space from which they later escape) is grounded entirely in America. This transition to ‘internationalism’ can be regarded in one sense as a loss to the Irish film industry of skilled creatives who can frame Irish stories in all their cultural specificity, and the notion of Irish stories being told by ‘outsiders’ can be seen as particularly contentious. However, an alternative current in the ‘internationalism’ of Irish cinema is the making of films in Ireland by diasporic filmmakers. Just as John Ford mobilised the emigrant gaze in The Quiet Man (1952), or John Huston adapted James Joyce in The Dead (1987), contemporary filmmakers are reincorporating the diasporic gaze into Irish film. Second-­ generation Irish (born in London) director John Michael McDonagh’s feature debut The Guard (2011)—a scabrous crime drama/Irish ‘spaghetti western’ centring a rollicking performance by Brendan Gleeson—provoked attention for its sharp evocation of Irish machismo and mocking dialogue, and the intensity of “its desire for an extreme ‘localisation’ of the genre … [which] swings into an intensely venial parochialism that, paradoxically, has a simultaneously wide common appeal” (Canning 2012). The generic elements and tone may be more muted in McDonagh’s Calvary (2014), but the sense of Ireland as a space evacuated of moral and structural certainty is stronger. Here a priest (Gleeson, again) is given a week to ‘put his house in order’ by a visitor to his confessional booth, after which he will be killed in metaphysical revenge for clerical sexual abuse committed against the man by another. “There’s no point in killing a bad priest, but killing a good one, that would be a shock,” declares the man, in a film Barton (2019: 190) describes as “drawing on intense contemporary anxieties about the failure of authority, and anger about the legacy of the Catholic Church”.

238 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

These ‘internationalised’ films and filmmakers can be seen as engaging in a discourse which harnesses Vanderschelden’s (2007: 38) perception that transnational films “through a combination of national, international and post-­ national elements … deliberately blend nations and cultures, rather than simply erasing cultural specificity”. The geographic direction of travel of this internationalism dictates the extent to which a film can be considered to ‘blend’ nations and cultures. The visual aspect of location remains key, but a filmmaker’s engagement with a film’s generic aspects, source material, and mode of linguistic address are implicated alongside them. Lenny Abrahamson’s Room might as easily have been made by an American filmmaker, such is the discursive power of the American mode and form of cinema he employs, yet McDonagh’s Calvary speaks distinctively to, and of, Irishness in its attempted harnessing of Irish speech patterns, despite—or because of—McDonagh’s own ambivalence about Ireland, Irish film, and the relationship his own cultural heritage ‘allows’ him to have with his source material.8 This chapter now investigates a film whose dual location allows it to, potentially, lay claim to having a specifically transnational nature, given that it functions as both ‘national cinema’ and ‘internationalised’ Irish film, in its examination of both Irish and American identity.

Case Study: Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015) As well as highlighting the particular conditions of the Irish film funding environment, Brooklyn allows us to consider some of the ways in which industrial and textual attributes intersect and reflect each other and how film can ‘perform’ the national and transnational simultaneously. Budgeted at approximately US$11,000,000 and involving multiple funding and distribution partners, including the Irish Film Board, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, British Film Institute Film Fund, BBC Films, Telefilm Canada, and SODEC Québec, and availing of the support of the EU MEDIA programme and Government of Ireland Section 481 tax credit, and filmed in Ireland, the USA, and Canada, Brooklyn is an exemplar of the internationalised industrial process involved in producing contemporary Irish film. It stars two of Ireland’s most bankable young actors, Saoirse Ronan and Domhnall Gleeson, both of whom have parlayed their ‘Irishness’ into distinctive characteristics of their emergent stardom. Adapted from Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel of the same name, Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), an emigrant from Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford to New York in the 1950s. Sponsored to travel by local Catholic priest Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), the film’s central dilemma is not whether Eilis can make a new life for herself in the new world—she adapts, despite homesickness, to new opportunities in the form of a job at Bartocci’s department store, studies bookkeeping at night school, and finds love with Italian-American plumber Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen)—but whether the lure of this new life is sufficient to overcome emotional ties to her homeland. This narrative core is mobilised when, after the sudden death of her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott),

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

239

Eilis returns home, newly married in secret to Tony, and finds that her time abroad has equipped her with the skills and confidence to live an entirely new kind of life in Enniscorthy than the one she left. Romanced by the prosperous, eligible Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), Eilis must embrace an American future, or radically re-imagine what life in Ireland could provide for her. She decides, finally, to commit to life as an emigrant, and the film concludes with Eilis and Tony embracing on a sunlit, tree-lined Brooklyn avenue—book-­ ending the film’s opening scene, set on a dark and empty Enniscorthy street, in a way that suggests a fruitful and prosperous future. The film centres around the emotional drama and physical process of emigration, a key aspect of Ireland’s national historical dynamic, and one which arguably structures many of its contemporary frameworks as well as its relationships with the rest of the world, most particularly America. The Irish cultural imaginary regarding emigration might previously have been considered in terms of a binary opposition between ‘liberation’ from repression and parochialism, and ‘death’, in the form of such historical tropes such as ‘the American wake’—the gathering traditionally held before an emigrant departed Ireland, in acknowledgement that friends and family would be unlikely to see them again. This vision of departure, on the contrary, couches Eilis’s emigration in terms of individualised choice set against a backdrop of family obligation and opportunities for betterment, and therefore speaks more to contemporary conceptions of the globalised flow of population from a privileged First World perspective—of people who are free to return, as well as free to leave. Therefore it speaks to a (highly ideological) notion of contemporary ‘Ireland Inc.’ perpetuated in Irish public discourse throughout the Celtic Tiger years: the notion of the mobile, highly educated Irish workforce who ‘choose’ to go abroad (and may come back) rather than being ‘forced into exile’ for socio-economic reasons. Brereton (2016) identifies Brooklyn in genre terms as having its lineage in a cycle of 1990s Irish heritage film, itself drawing from the corresponding British tradition, as framed by Ruth Barton (2004). For Brereton, the “nostalgic, Edenic view of Ireland” (Barton 2004: 148) partially gives way to a “particular nostalgic appeal” (Brereton 2016: 285). That nostalgic appeal is for an Ireland simultaneously clung to and rejected by Eilis, and critiqued by Jim, who defers to her new-found sophistication when he says “We don’t really know anything of the rest of the world. We must seem very backward to you now”. Her reply “Of course not. You seem calm, and civilised, and charming” is that of a woman who has been transformed by emigration, and with the majority of the action centred on New York, by the city itself, and can now only conceive of her country of origin from a position of emotional distance. She consciously adapts to circumstances in Brooklyn, making the effort to become a successful immigrant—adopting the fashionable dress, make-up, and love interest which, it seems, will assist her assimilation. From deserting the newly arrived (and thus representative of old Ireland) Dolores from Cavan at a dance, to applying lipstick with the assimilated girls from her boarding house, to dancing with Tony at the parish hall, Eilis moves away from her position as

240 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

a homesick ‘good girl’ and embraces the new world. Tony’s gentle note to her, in the context of dancing, that “The secret is to look as if you know what you are doing” can also, it seems, be applied to the wider Irish film industry. The secret to negotiating the liminal space between the globalised industry and the localised national industry is “to look as if you know what you are doing”, taking on stories that are not necessarily representative of old Irish tropes, and utilising the influences that seem to speak most to an international audience. However, Eilis’s process of transformation is not uncomplicated. Just as this film is a story of emigration, it is also a story of immigration. The transnational dimension lies not just in the assumption that it speaks to Americans of Irish heritage as much as to Irish audiences themselves but also in the way it speaks to the specificity of New York’s place in the American popular imaginary, and perhaps to nostalgicised gaps between ‘historical’, multi-racial, Brooklyn, and contemporary gentrification of the area. With its glossy costuming and detailed accumulation of period detail foregrounded—and with Montreal, another beneficiary of internationalised funding and production incentives, largely standing in for Brooklyn—the film attempts to conceive of the district as a ‘melting pot’, but in limited terms which privilege white Irish experience. Where tentative cross-cultural intersections and conflicts are hinted at—Eilis takes lessons in eating spaghetti before braving an invitation to Tony’s house, where Tony’s brother refers to “Irish cops” beating up Italian-­ Americans—the film is more shy of engaging with the intensity of diasporic and cultural intertwinement which tends to characterise cities like New York. One of the few moments when African Americans are visible on-screen is in a brief scene of Eilis at a crosswalk (see Fig. 13.1), with Eilis at the heart of a bustling,

Fig. 13.1  Racially diverse streets in Brooklyn (2015) are a backdrop to interrogations of Irishness in (white) America

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

241

diverse New York street scene, surrounded by—but isolated from—Americans. This image shows us the immigrant destination as conceived of in resolutely individualist terms, a site of competition for place and resources. Both the presence and the framing of the shot, with its wide angle emphasising the streets’ diversity in visual terms only—placing African Americans in the mise en scène but not in the story—serve to reinforce the narrative’s overall de-emphasis of cultural heterogeneity in the city. Indeed, as one nervous young boat passenger muses, as Eilis returns to New  York to be reunited with Tony, “People say there’s so many Irish people there, it’s like home”. In this way the ‘national’ within the transnational reasserts itself at various moments. A key scene in which this process is mobilised is one set in the period in which Eilis, home in Enniscorthy for her sister’s funeral and a friend’s wedding, is persuaded to stay and take on some work as a bookkeeper at a local business. Newly self-assured following her successful assimilation into the Irish-­ American community in Brooklyn, and by extension, through marriage, into the Italian-American one, she sees Ireland differently when given the opportunity to earn her own money. This autonomy and power is heightened by her changed status at home, as can be seen in Fig. 13.2. At dinner with Jim and friends eager to hear about her new life, she confidently positions herself as the conversation’s leader, and they, noticeably, defer to her presumed sophistication. The reflected glamour of New  York is emphasised in her fashionable clothes—which also include a chic and rather daring, by rural Irish standards of the time, swimsuit—and make-up, contrasting with the fusty, old-world ­surroundings of the ‘respectable’ Wexford hotel. However, when Eilis is asked about the Empire State Building, her response is “Ah, but that’s Manhattan. I

Fig. 13.2  Brooklyn (2015) may be set in New York, but Eilis’s sights are more limited, as “All the skyscrapers are across the river”

242 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

live in Brooklyn, and I work in Brooklyn, and if I go out I go out in Brooklyn. All the skyscrapers are across the river”. In this scene, Eilis’s cosmopolitan Irish-Americanness is dropped in favour of emphasising the historically clustered nature of the diaspora in places like Boston, Sydney, or London—with groups of Irish immigrants forming tight-knit communities which may be as supportive (or parochial, or restrictive) as those at home. Irish audiences can be expected to read the film in these terms; an American audience may not. Richard Brody (2015) writing in the New Yorker emphatically rejects what he describes as the way in which the film ‘sanitises’ Brooklyn. For him, Eilis has “no sense of New York mythology, no curiosity. She … goes to New York as a blank slate with a blank mind” (Brody 2015). Where an Irish viewer may read longing for community and familiarity, and the film as attempting to engage with the sense of (temporary or permanent) displacement that attends emigrants, and the emotional consequences of having to negotiate the de/re-spatialisation of the world, a New York viewer reads failure to engage adequately with the new world. Whether seen as an international film, a universalist story of love, a coming-of-age narrative, or a tale of migration to ‘any’ location, it can also be read as a specifically transnational film; it tells one story to its Irish viewers, negotiating the collective absence of generations of emigrants, and it tells a different one to its American viewers, that of the emotional drama of its own history of assimilation and difference. These threads, of old and new identities in competition with each other, come to a poignant juncture when Eilis, volunteering with her local parish at Christmas in an effort to stave off homesickness, encounters a group of elderly, isolated, perhaps indigent men—the Irish emigrants of fifty years previous. “These”, Father Flood, one of Irish cinema’s new ‘good’ priests alongside Calvary’s Father James, tells her, “are the men who built the tunnels, the bridges, the highways”. The moment in which one of them sings Casadh an tSúgáin, a haunting traditional air, is perhaps the closest the film comes to delivering a rebuke: to contemporary Ireland, which has exiled these men twice over by considering only the fluidity of emigration, and not its fixity, but also to America, which has forgotten their contribution to its development.

Conclusion Brooklyn shows how a small national industry can—under certain circumstances—negotiate cultural production in the shadow of a dominant Hollywood industry. The film is in conversation with the globalised audiovisual industry’s economy through both its narrative structure and its production structure, which is the product of ongoing debates around the commercial and cultural value of film. Problematising the trope of the ‘successful emigrant’ by illustrating the emotional difficulties and dilemmas attendant on emigration, the film shows how Eilis actively negotiates the relationship between home and the new world. Brooklyn can be seen as an example of glocalisation, whereby it takes up the challenge set by McLoone (2009) of ‘living with’ Hollywood, and arguably turns Hollywood’s gaze back on itself, to interrogate America as well as Ireland.

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

243

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Can you think of other films which explore diasporic identities or the diasporic experience on-screen? What do they say about the ways in which identity can be constructed? 2. For you, has globalisation resulted in the American cultural domination of film? If so, what currents can you see challenging this? 3. Should national cinemas be supported by the state, or required to operate on the basis of market conditions alone? What are the implications for production and film culture in terms of each model?

Notes 1. The full title is the 1968 Report of the Film Industry Committee in Ireland, 1968, and it was commissioned by the then minister for industry and commerce. 2. The explicit use of the term ‘tax expenditure’ as preferred by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) instead of the more usual ‘tax relief’ or ‘tax incentive’ is a conscious decision to reflect the true nature of such subsidies, as expenditures on the public purse (OECD (2010), Tax Expenditures in OECD Countries, OECD Publishing, Paris). 3. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/budget-2014-spielberg-inspires-tomcruise-clause-that-will-bring-hollywood-blockbusters-here-29667460.html. 4. https://www.starwars.com/news/designing-star-wars-the-last-jedi-part-1-howporgs-were-hatched. 5. See Chap. 17 for a more detailed discussion of the film. 6. The Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) 1845–1849 followed the failure of the Irish potato crop—the main affordable food supply of the population—due to infection by potato blight. More than one million of the population of eight million died of starvation, and two million more were forced to emigrate. Other food supplies were unaffected, but were exported to Britain; the British government’s response to the disaster was slow, and was condemned worldwide. 7. Statistics from US Census Bureau 2013 American Community Survey. An additional 3 million people additionally identified as ‘Scotch-Irish’ and whose heritage is that of Scottish/Ulster Protestantism. See https://factfinder.census.gov/ faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk. 8. Following controversial 2014 comments on the quality of Irish film, McDonagh noted, “I didn’t want [Calvary] to be perceived as a small, parochial, ‘Irish’ film. This intention on my part has been wilfully misrepresented by a small section of the Dublin media with an axe to grind. What has been most dispiriting to me, however, is the low-level bigotry that has reared its head in the fallout from the interview. I am an Irish citizen, a child of Irish parents, nearly all my friends and work associates are Irish, and yet because I was born in London I supposedly have no right to comment on Irish film” Flynn and Tracey (2015).

244 

M. O’BRIEN AND L. CANNING

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Barton, Ruth. 2004. Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge. ———. 2019. Irish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brereton, Pat. 2016. Brooklyn [Review]. Estudios Irlandeses 11: 285–287. Brody, Richard, 2015. The Sanitized Past of ‘Brooklyn’. The New Yorker, November 6. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-sanitized-past-of-brooklyn. Accessed 13 February 2019. Canning, Laura. 2012. “Not in Front of the American”: Place, Parochialism and Linguistic Play in John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard. Estudios Irlandeses 7: 206–208. Condon, Denis. 2008. Early Irish Cinema: 1895–1921. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. 2018. An Plean Gníomhaíochta Closamhairc Colún 4 den Chlár Éire Ildánach/Audiovisual Action Plan Creative Ireland Programme Pillar 4. Ireland: Dublin. Flynn, Roddy. 2007. Raiders of the Lost Archive: the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Film Industry 1942. Irish Communication Review 10 (1): 3. Flynn, Roddy, and Tony Tracy. 2015. Irish Film and Television – 2014. Estudios Irlandeses: Journal of Irish Studies [Online, Accessed 5 March 2020], (10), (15 March, 2015). Gao, Zhihao. 2009. Serving a Stir-Fry of Market, Culture and Politics – On Globalization and Film Policy in Greater China. Policy Studies 30 (4): 423–438. Ging, Debbie. 2012. What Richard Did. [Review]. Estudios Irlandeses 8: 210. Gray, Clive. 2002. Local Government and the Arts. Local Government Studies 28 (1): 77–90. Higson, Andrew. 2003. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, John W. 2006. Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics. London: British Film Institute. Holohan, Conn. 2009. Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Kirby, Peadar, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, eds. 2002. Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. California: Pluto Press. McLoone, Martin. 2009. National Cinema and Global Culture: The Case of Irish Cinema. In Cinemas of Ireland, eds. Isabelle le Corff, & Estelle Epinoux, 14--27. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Miège, Bernard. 1989. The Capitalization of Cultural Production. New  York: International General. Murphy, Denis, and Maria O’Brien. 2015. Irish Film Finance Rebooted: The New Section 481. Estudios Irlandeses 10: 225. O’Brien, Maria. 2019. The Audiovisual Action Plan: A New Audiovisual Policy for Ireland. Cultural Trends 28: 417–428. O’Connell, Dióg. 2010. New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film. Bristol; Chicago: Intellect.

13  BROOKLYN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN… 

245

Ramsey, Phil, Stephen Baker, and Robert Porter. 2019. Screen Production on the “biggest Set in the World”: Northern Ireland Screen and the Case of Game of Thrones. Media, Culture & Society 41 (6): 845–62. Robertson, Roland. 2012. Globalisation or Glocalisation? The Journal of International Communication 18 (2): 191–208. Rockett, K. 2012. Knocknagow, the Film Company of Ireland, and Other Irish Historical Films, 1911–1920. Screening the Past, no. 33. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/02/knocknagow-the-film-company-of-ireland-and-otherirish-historical-films/. Accessed 13 May 2019. Tracy, Tony, and Roddy Flynn. 2017. Contemporary Irish Film: From the National to the Transnational. Éire/Ireland 52 (1–2): 169–197. Vanderschelden, Isabelle. 2007. Strategies for a ‘Transnational’/French Popular Cinema. Modern and Contemporary France 15 (1): 37–50. Vestheim, Geir. 1994. Instrumental Cultural Policy in Scandinavian Countries: A Critical Historical Perspective. International Journal of Cultural Policy 1 (1): 57–71.

PART III

Genres

CHAPTER 14

On the Eve of the Journey: The New European Road Movie Laura Rascaroli

Definitions Transnational Extending beyond the national borders of a single country. This idea has emerged in recent decades in describing how international economic and social forces make their presence felt across borders. It may be linked with discussions of postnationalism, postcolonialism and globalisation, and how these affect the production of film and its representations. Considering the transnational means interrogating ideas of the global and local, interfaces between national and international, and the idea of ‘national cinema’. Eurocentrism A worldview which centres Europe as the source of ‘civilisation’ and progress, and frames other cultures and geographic locations as subordinate to its cultural and material power. Eurocentric views may seek to justify European colonialism and other imperialism and to denigrate non-European artistic and

Laura Rascaroli, On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais, published in: Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt eds., Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary FrenchLanguage Road Movie, 2013, Intellect, reproduced with permission of Intellect. L. Rascaroli (*) Film and Screen Media Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_14

249

250 

L. RASCAROLI

intellectual achievements. Both academia and film culture have been considered to be overtly and problematically Eurocentric in defining film canons and in their interpretation of non-Western film work. Deterritorialisation A concept originated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus. Once a psychoanalytic term referring to the fluidity and displacement of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist societies, it has been adapted to describe how globalised modernity ‘dislocates’ people both physically and in their sense of identity. It can also describe how migration and the mediatisation of society may simultaneously distance people from their geographic origins and intensify engagement with their originating culture.

Introduction Time and again, in road movies the journey is represented as liberation—from a domesticity and society that are perceived as suffocating, from persecution, poverty and war or from personal and relational failures. The journey, in this sense, is a narrative device that channels the energies of both protagonist and film; the forward movement guarantees a release of tension, even though a precise destination often does not exist in road movies—thus accounting for the genre’s open-endedness and even penchant for tragic endings. The tension that finds relief through the journey is not only relevant to character psychology, but also to story, in terms of the film’s need to overcome a narrative obstruction, consisting in either inner or external obstacles, which hinder the departure. The energies thus released are at once emotional and aesthetic, inasmuch as the psychological alleviation experienced by the protagonist frequently merges with specific filmic pleasures enjoyed by the spectator. It is on the road that the distinct, kinetic energy and aesthetic dimension of the travel film become actualised. Travel, of course, is not always synonymous with pleasure, but can run contrary to it. Displacement, exile, diaspora and unproductive or self-destructive wandering, for instance, all evoke a sense of displeasure and even of annihilation of the self and are often connected to a lack of free agency. However, even when the journey is voluntary and yearned for by the traveller, tension may still be present and materialise in a pleasure/displeasure dynamic. In contrast to the mobilisation of narrative and release of tension described above, a number of French migration road movies of the past decade focus on states of strain and discomfort, for which little or no relief is found through motion. This effect is achieved by focusing on the eve of the journey rather than on the journey itself. In these films, the tension belongs, first of all, to the characters, to the extent that they are either held back or brood over the possibility of departing; however, it also has a much broader dimension that exceeds the personal sphere. The (planned, desired, delayed) journey becomes, indeed, the locus of the

14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 

251

manifestation of tensions which characterise and affect life in contemporary French and European societies at large and which have to do with pressures and strains created by factors such as border management, economic polarisation and political discourses on matters of migration, citizenship, mobility and identity. The three examples of this trend that this chapter considers are Far (2001), Since Otar Left (2003) and—in a more detailed case study—Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009). While diverse in style and ambition, they share an interest in matters of legal and, especially, illegal immigration, and a hindered journey is at the core of their narrative and thematic concerns. In addition, they all fall in the category that Carrie Tarr has tentatively called ‘pre-border-crossing films’. According to Tarr, in these films the “mise-en-scène of destabilised, unsettling border spaces combined with a foregrounding of the migrant’s subjectivity and agency invite the Western spectator to understand their choice of deterritorialisation and sympathise with their resulting vulnerability and isolation” (Tarr 2007: 11). Similarly to Tarr, I here look at films that we can call ‘French’ while being conscious of the fact that “the transnational elements mobilised in films about migration call into question the validity of analysing border crossings within the limited framework of a national cinema, or even within the larger context of European cinema” (Tarr 2007: 9). The first two of these films are international co-productions (between France and Spain and France and Belgium respectively). Far was co-written by Téchiné with the Moroccan writer Faouzi Bensaïdi, “and is moreover quadrilingual, with dialogue in French, English, Spanish and Arabic, as well as a prayer in Hebrew” (Marshall 2007: 115). Both other films also are multilingual: a French production, Welcome includes much dialogue in English, as well as some Kurdish and Turkish; in Since Otar Left Georgian, French and Russian are spoken. These films’ transnationalism is of course central to their redefinition of both immigrant and French identities, as well as of ideas of Eurocentrism. In her analysis of road movies produced in the 1990s and 2000s in Slovenia, Polona Petek has noted a tendency in recent European road movies to go in “the direction of immobility or, more accurately, the direction of stalled or refused mobility” (Petek 2010: 219). Petek reads this tendency positively, with reference to the films’ constructive critique of both Eurocentrism and of the elitist Western view of cosmopolitanism as coinciding with capitalism, which they replace with the project of an alternative, non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. In particular, for Petek these films’ choice to support the “interweaving of pro-European and yugonostalgic discourses, grounded on both sides of the European border, instantiates or, at least, paves the way for such a multi-sited cosmopolitanism” (222). In the French pre-border-crossing films I explore here, instead, while the stalling of movement certainly amounts to a critique of Eurocentrism, it does not result in a clear alternative cosmopolitan project, but becomes the expression of profound social tensions. This chapter reflects on the centrality (or, indeed, marginality) of France to these films. Each is set in a location that can be described, in terms of global

252 

L. RASCAROLI

geopolitics, as peripheral with reference to both France and Western Europe: in Tangier, Tbilisi and Calais, respectively. By talking from the margins, each of these films reconfigures the European continent and the place that France thinks itself to occupy in it. As well as examining tension from the point of view of character psychology and of the films’ broad thematic concerns, I also discuss it in narratological terms—and show how, rather than the open-endedness of the typical road movie narrative, these films are characterised by stasis, circularity and repetition, in a way that simultaneously compounds the characters’ feelings of entrapment and contributes to the idea of a sociocultural tension that cannot find release in the transformative experience of the journey.

Borders and Borderlands Because of the statement that the three films make through their choice of marginalising France, it seems productive to pay some attention to how they engage with actual margins. By the term ‘borderlands’ I here intend spaces that are constructed as limens and frontiers and that function as representations of soft borders and, indirectly, of ideas of France and Europe according to the discursive axes South/North and East/West. It is not necessary for a film to include images of a border in order to evoke it. Equally, crossing a border does not necessarily imply the physical act of traversing the line of demarcation between two countries: For many travellers, the border crossing point is located at the check-in counters at the airports in their home countries. It may be the airline officials who undertake the task or, as is increasingly the case in Canada and some other western countries, the creation of a micro piece of ex-territory under US jurisdiction in the foreign airport territory. (Newman 2006: 178)

Similarly, micro-pieces of another country may be found in large ports, as in Far, which foregrounds ports as borderlands and sets significant sections of its narrative in the ports of Algeciras, the largest Spanish city on the Bay of Gibraltar, and especially of Tangier, Morocco, situated at the western entrance to the Strait. The entire city of Tangier can be seen as a borderland, as remarked by André Téchiné himself when he said that Tangier is one of those “frontier-­ spaces, places that are both bridges and barriers, places of transit” (quoted in Marshall 2007: 118). Serge (Stéphane Rideau), a young French truck driver, can cross over legally, though not without delays, given the controls implemented in order to police the trafficking of both drugs and people between northern Africa and southern Europe. His friend Saïd (Mohamed Hamaidi), instead, is one of the many Moroccans who converge on Tangier and hang around the port—the film’s true borderland—waiting for an opportunity to hide under a lorry and cross over to Spain. Here, in spite of the incessant transcontinental circulation of goods, the demarcation between two sides, and indeed two worlds—North

14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 

253

and South, neoliberal Europe and developing Africa, First and Third World, Schengen and non-EU, former coloniser and ex-colonies—becomes most evident. As Étienne Balibar has noted, “globalization tends to knock down frontiers with respect to goods and capital while at the same time erecting a whole system of barriers against the influx of a workforce and the ‘right to flight’ that migrants exercise in the face of misery, war, and dictatorial regimes in their countries of origin” (Balibar 2003: 37). Arguably, the port is at once a small-­ scale version of the global melting pot, a microcosmic rendition of the tensions between the north and the south of the world, and a representation of the conflict between two competing forms of power: the state and organised crime. The question of where power and rights reside, however, is profoundly problematised in this borderland: far from being organised according to a clear-cut, binary model of spatial division (here/there, Europe/Africa, legal/ illegal), the port is a hybrid space—neither fully Moroccan, nor fully European— in which different logics and laws meet, clash and coexist, and in which borders can be negotiated in various ways. Vehicles are prominent in Far, including bikes, scooters, old cars, and Serge’s lorry. It is appropriate to ‘read’ these vehicles in terms of the characters’ dissimilar levels of mobility and freedom; in particular, we may consider Serge’s lorry as another instance of the presence of the borderland in Far. Described with some pride to a deeply impressed Saïd, Serge’s new French-registered truck—a Swedish-made Scania—is evidently framed as state-of-the-art northern European machinery, as well as an actualisation of the Western world’s ability to translate its aggressive neoliberal credo into advanced technology and unstoppable mobility. Indeed, the lorry puts together scientific innovation and commercial dynamism, thus confirming Europe’s traditional force of penetration into less industrialised regions. It is surely not by chance that the lorry bears on its sides, in huge block letters, the words Plateforme européenne: a signifier of both Europe and France, Serge’s truck gestures towards old Europe’s continued success at colonising faraway lands for commercial purposes. It is of some import, indeed, that a young Frenchman has access to the latest European technology, while the Moroccan man drives a battered bike, a piece of colonial import that testifies to the first world’s smart industrial penetration into the third. The truck may be seen as a borderland, in the sense of a mobile micro-piece of France within Morocco. Yet, in spite of its display of technology and power, the vehicle literally goes à la dérive, astray, on account of the directionless Serge’s existential crisis. This may be at the root of his mysteriously motivated decision to start smuggling drugs into Europe on his lorry. Although he finally realises the magnitude of what he has embarked on, Serge is left with no choice but to drive to a rendezvous, at which an armed man takes his truck away without a word. For one night, stuck in the middle of nowhere, Serge is dispossessed of his European rights and of his shell of security and protected mobility. While his lorry is returned to him, it is no longer his, for it has been tampered with and is now the carrier of the goods of his new ‘employers’. Serge’s last act,

254 

L. RASCAROLI

as he leaves Morocco, is to hide Saïd on his truck and grant him a passage to Spain—in spite of having frequently told him in the past that “leaving is not a solution”, and that he should stop dreaming of Europe, which is “all a pipe dream”. The film’s final shot is of the boat leaving the port; the abrupt ending of the extra-diegetic music, which “cuts off the final image” (Marshall 2007: 120), serves to highlight that this is only the beginning of Saïd’s journey into the unknown.

South/North, East/West The globalising discourses that became predominant in the 1980s and 1990s posited what was substantially to become a borderless world: “Faced with the onslaught of cyber and satellite technology, as well as the free unimpeded flow of global capital, borders would—so the globalization purists argued—gradually open until they disappeared altogether” (Newman 2006: 172). The past decade, possibly as a reaction to these discourses, has seen an interdisciplinary renaissance of border studies; similarly, these three films, which span the whole decade, decidedly reiterate the importance of barriers—physical, social, legal, economic—and engage with the border as a process rather than as a static notion. Borders pertain, of course, to the sphere of power, and power relations are a main factor in border demarcations (Newman 2006: 175), as well as in the exercise of the control and restriction of movement. The differential power that becomes evident around borders is one of the sources of the tension that emerges in the chosen films. Mindful of the fact that borders are not limited to the actual line of demarcation between two countries, Klaus Eder has suggested that distinctions must be drawn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ borders. Hard borders function not only on the basis of actual barriers but also on the existence of soft boundaries that have to do with the production of meaning: The difference between both is that the former, the hard borders, are institutionalized borders, written down in legal texts. The soft borders of Europe are encoded in other types of texts indicating a pre-institutional social reality, the reality of images of what Europe is and who are Europeans and who are not. (Eder 2006: 256)

The films here represent both hard and soft borders and, arguably, participate in the shaping of the latter, for they produce images of what Europe is and is not. The visibility of a film such as Welcome in French and European political discourses on immigration corroborates this statement: the film was screened in both the French and the European parliaments and on March 2nd 2009 the director Lioret debated the issue of French legislation on illegal immigrants with Éric Besson, Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Mutually-Supportive Development in the government of François Fillon, on the France 3 programme Ce soir (ou jamais!).

14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 

255

The three films comment on the two main frontiers of Europe—southern and eastern; and each does so while placing France (which is evoked either directly or via its conspicuous absence) at the centre of a reconfiguration of the continent. The films, furthermore, frame France from the north, south and east respectively, thus looking at its three most important hard borders. More specifically, Welcome, which takes place in Calais and is narratively projected towards England, is set against the backdrop of concepts of the South/North divide, one which overturns the original idea of European civilisation as constructed from the south and the Mediterranean. Today, the prevalent discourse sees the North as a civilising force set in contrast to the ‘problem’ of a South depicted as inexorably lagging behind in the modernisation process. In Welcome, it is northern Europe, namely England, that attracts immigration, and not France, which is perceived as a border itself—as the southern frontier of the civilised North. Far also looks at the South/North divide, and in particular at the southern border of Europe, from the distinctive point of view of Arabic North Africa. As Eder reminds us, this area, in contrast to Black Africa, could potentially be considered European, since “[i]t could claim a long common tradition of being part of the Roman Empire, of an intellectual common ground over centuries of the Christian-Islamic culture up to the colonization of North Africa by the French” (Eder 2006: 263). Yet, this border remains fixed, and the southern frontier of Europe has now moved to the southeast, coinciding with Turkey. In Far, too, France is no longer central to the emigrants’ dreams and is indeed practically irrelevant to the narrative. A French truck driver travels the Spain/ Morocco commercial route in search of adventure; of his Moroccan friends, one dreams of Spain and a generic Europe, while the other considers immigrating to Canada. France is thus drastically repositioned, albeit in a world that is still conditioned by the visible inheritance of French colonisation. Finally, Since Otar Left … focuses on the East/West boundary. The East provides the second frontier of Europe. In the narrations of this frontier, the ‘second other’ of Europe was constructed. This East appears as Russia, providing a referent for something that Europe is different from. From Tsarist Russia to Communist Russia, a particular sense of threat was imagined. The East is the space from once [sic] the ‘Mongols’ came, then the ‘Russians’ and finally the ‘Soviet Communists’. (Eder 2006: 264)

Bertuccelli’s film arguably proposes the whole of the Caucasian independent state of Georgia as a borderland. Located at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and western Asia, independent from Russia since 1991, Georgia is a member of the Council of Europe and aspires to join the EU. Set mainly in the capital city, Tbilisi, and in its last section in Paris, it is the least dynamic of the three films, even though its narrative focuses on two journeys of immigration to France: the first, in fact, takes place before the start of the narrative, while the second begins at its end.

256 

L. RASCAROLI

The country is represented in the film as physically and metaphorically wedged between East and West, and more precisely between Russia and Europe—or, better, France. Emma Wilson has suggested that the film looks “at subjective journeys, at fantasies of France and of Georgia” (Wilson 2009: 90); indeed, the three main characters, who represent three generations of women— grandmother Eka (Esther Gorintin), her daughter Marina (Nino Khomassouridze) and her granddaughter Ada (Dinara Droukarova)—are keenly involved in the production of personal and family narratives involving both Russia and France. Ideas of Paris and France are evoked throughout the film, as the women frequently speak about Eka’s beloved son, Otar, who, in spite of holding a medical degree, emigrated to Paris two years before. Furthermore, their house is full of the classics of French literature, which Eka’s husband had shipped directly from France, and carefully hid from the Bolsheviks. Russia is evoked both by Eka’s Soviet cult of French culture and by the post-­ Soviet environs of Tbilisi, including the drab block where Marina’s lover lives, the post office, “a sullen relic of the Soviet era” (Graffy 2004: 69), the porcelain factory where Ada finds some work as an interpreter, and the impersonal offices where Marina and Ada discover the circumstances of Otar’s tragic death, following a fall in the building site where he was working. While Georgia’s infrastructure (light, water, telephone, roads, public transport, postal service) is presented as severely deficient, both as an inheritance of the Soviet era and for the inefficiency of the new government (Marina comments regarding civil servants that “ever since independence, they are just as stupid”), Eka is ready to declare herself a Stalinist, “if being a Stalinist means being honest, patriotic and altruistic”. The main fantasy created by the women is that of Otar’s continued existence in Paris after his death. Marina wishes to spare her mother the truth, and Ada, first reluctantly, then with some gusto, begins to draft letters that she reads to Eka, as if they came from Otar. In them, Otar’s life in Paris is embellished even more than in his own letters, which he wrote for his old mother’s benefit. It is understandable why the film evokes so complex an account of personal, familial and national identities: after the end of the Soviet rule, the country found itself in the position of having to create its own identity, somewhere in between post-Soviet reality, pre-Soviet ideas of Georgian culture, a range of ethnic and religious communities and the pull of market economy (see Gachechiladze 1995). Georgia’s actual geographical, cultural, economic and social in-­ betweenness is further intensified in the film by the three women’s dreaming of France. Tbilisi is constructed as a hybrid space, located between Asia, Eastern Europe and Western Europe—as well as past and future, and myth and reality. However, the pull of Western Europe on Bertucelli’s characters is no less than ruinous, both for individual Georgians and for their country. Otar decided to leave both Georgia and the medical profession and emigrate to Paris; the difficulty of doing so is demonstrated via the character of Ada’s occasional boyfriend, who is constantly planning to go west, but who, after his

14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 

257

latest failed attempt, returns home admitting that “the Turkish customs officers are bastards”. Otar never appears on screen; yet, the film is able to convey something of the experience of the non-EU immigrant worker in contemporary Paris. It is most significant that Otar is only ever seen in photographs and that when he phones we do not hear his voice (nor we hear it when his letters are read out, usually by Ada). Otar’s absence suggests that, as sans-papiers (an immigrant with no valid documentation), he has become an expendable ‘inexistent nonperson’, to use Balibar’s expression. This is confirmed by the details of his death: the builder denies ever having hired him, and he is buried in a pauper’s grave. The women decide to ignore this reality; the fake letters they write intimate Otar’s participation in a social and cultural life from which he was entirely excluded. In a faked photomontage, Otar stands outside the Moulin Rouge, simultaneously a signifier of the mythical turn-of-the-century France and the economic and cultural exuberance of the Belle Époque; a most typical tourist landmark, and the home of the seductive cancan. The chosen setting suggests that the women imagine him living within the old cultural framework with which they identify France, and enjoying the many pleasures that Paris offers to tourists. The women’s denial of the reality of Otar’s condition as illegal immigrant and worker and the illusory quality of their cosmopolitan borderland are finally exposed, at least to the spectator, when they eventually travel to Paris. Where Bertucelli’s Georgia has a crumbling infrastructure, its poverty seems graceful and charming; the women’s house is pleasant, full of old family objects and good books; they even own a dacha in the country where they go to rest and collect fruit. They are forced to sell old belongings, yet they seem to have much. Paris, by contrast, for those coming from the East and the South, is associated with real, ungraceful squalor. The three women stay in a cheap, unappealing hotel, and the building where Otar lived is impersonal and neglected, full of immigrants living on the poverty line. Mostly shot in the rain, Paris is congested, noisy and impersonal—the opposite of Tbilisi’s pleasant streets. One of the film’s most significant moments is when Eka, having finally learned of her son’s death from his former neighbour, finds herself sitting near some railway tracks—an image powerfully suggestive of the fact that travel and displacement killed Otar. And yet, Eka chooses to continue to delude herself; she says to her daughter and granddaughter that Otar departed for America, where he always wanted to go, and announces she now wants to visit Paris. A montage of images emphasising tourist landmarks and opulent shops conveys the women’s tourist experience. Again, they refuse to see the reality of the immigrant’s Paris, and continue to embrace a utopian/touristic vision of La Ville-Lumière, so much so that, at the end of their holiday, Ada decides to stay. While Eka is delighted by Ada’s choice, which endorses and perpetuates her belief of her family’s belonging to an imaginary France, Marina—who has fewer illusions—is devastated.

258 

L. RASCAROLI

This is the only film in which France is still regarded a utopian destination by the characters; seen from beyond the post-Soviet eastern border, thus, France is still equivalent with old Europe. The film, however, shows how the repositioning of the West/East border after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc is challenging the idea of what being European means. In Georgia, a country wedged between Russia and Turkey, we get acquainted with characters who not only speak French but also feel French. In spite of its spiritual proximity with Paris, though, post-Communist Georgia is as distant from France as it was in the past, if not more.

Case Study: Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009) Set in Calais, Lioret’s Welcome premiered in France on 11 March 2009. On 22 September, Calais was in the news when the French police, on orders of minister Besson, dismantled ‘The Jungle’, the immigrants’ makeshift camp near the port. After the camp was cleared, bulldozers were brought in to raze the shelters (including a mosque and a shrine); many immigrants were taken to detention centres all over France, while some French rights protesters who had scuffled with the police were also arrested. Subsequently, some suggested that the operation was solely aimed at placating British public opinion; indeed, soon the situation returned to ‘normality’. Currently, hundreds of immigrants live in the area, with the sans-papiers always under threat of being arrested and repatriated. Lioret’s film makes explicit reference to a controversial immigration law (L622-1), which is part of the increasingly tough measures France adopted under Nicolas Sarkozy, first as Minister of the Interior under Jacques Chirac (2002–2004; 2005–2007), then as President of the Republic (2007–2012). The effects of Sarkozy’s policies are reflected in the drastic reduction in acceptances of applications for asylum during the period; rejections went from 20% in the 1980s to 83.4% in 2006 (Lydie 2008: 78). The law referenced in the ironically titled Welcome, a norm included in the 2009 Finance Law, set a quota for arrests of those who help illegal immigrants at 5000 for 2009 and 5500 for 2011. Helping illegal immigrants carries a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment and a €30,000 fine. Within the tight confines of this norm, the work of volunteers and charities is also regarded as a crime. The redefinition of identities and readjustment of cultural perceptions through the journey of emigration are on the agenda in Welcome, for all that it is not a traditional road movie. While completely revolving around a trip, most of the film focuses on a stopover in the protagonist’s journey, and is therefore rather static both in its location and its employment of a rather static camera. In it, 17-year-old Kurdish refugee, Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), is stuck in Calais, having travelled on foot from Kurdistan, covering 4000  kilometres in three months, with the aim of reaching his girlfriend, who has immigrated to London with her family. His epic journey is not visualised; its hardships are not completely lost on the spectator, however, especially when Bilal recounts having

14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 

259

been captured by the Turkish army and forced to wear a black bag over his head for eight days. This piece of information places in an even more tragic light his first attempt at crossing the Channel aboard a lorry; incapable of keeping a plastic bag over his head to evade the CO2 monitoring at the border, Bilal gives away both himself and the other stowaways, who are all arrested. Realising that it will be impossible for him to cross the Channel in this manner, he decides to learn to swim and starts attending the local pool to take lessons from Simon (Vincent Lindon). Simon begins to help Bilal mainly in hopes of impressing his former wife, who is a volunteer providing food for the immigrants at the port. Slowly, however, he forges a solid bond with Bilal, won over by the teenager’s vast determination and swimming talent. Calais truly is the ‘last border’ for Bilal, who has no interest in staying in France and, like so many immigrants from Africa and the Middle East today, has his mind set on the UK. The strongest source of tension in the film is time: Bilal is under pressure because his girlfriend’s father is about to marry her to a cousin. His entrapment in Calais is compounded by the proximity of his destination and by his progressive realisation of the imperviousness of the last border. Thus, the whole city is a frontier for the migrants; it is not a destination but something in between a prison and an enforced purgatory, complete with tantalising views of paradise in the shape of the White Cliffs of Dover. Precisely as in Far, the port and beach, two of the film’s main settings, are constructed as liminal spaces. It is winter, and the climate in Calais being much colder than in Tangier means that these margins look significantly less colourful and welcoming. The area of the port that is used for the distribution of food is squalid and open, providing no refuge from the police and the bitter cold. The beach, permanently shot in an icy, grey light, with its air of wintertime abandonment, does not invite bodily pleasures, but is a containing border, from which Bilal longingly gazes at England and plans his crossing. The most distinctive borderland in the film, however, is the swimming pool. Because of the unforgiving cold of the sea, it is the warmer and safer water that provides the fluidity of a margin in which an illegal immigrant may find refuge and friendship and prepare for the next and final leg of his journey. It is most significant, however, that the swimming pool is not a cell of political dissent within mainstream society and is not welcoming from the start. Simon lets Bilal enter because he pays for his lessons, but throws out his friends who are ready to pay for a shower, and even threatens to call the police. The pool—which displays a large sign for the local swimming team, ‘Calais Natation’, and whose lane ropes and swimming aids are in the tricolored hues of the national flag—is suggestive of both the local and the national enclaves. Through it, it is the nation itself that is depicted as a borderland, one where the rigidity of the law and the brutality of its enforcement (the police are shown in a particularly critical light in the film), as well as the paranoia dominating part of the public opinion, are in evidence. And yet, this is also a space where some individuals act upon their convictions and, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have it, live ‘smooth’ in a ‘striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).

260 

L. RASCAROLI

The idea of the striation of space by organising principles such as money, work, roads and housing is particularly useful when thinking of this film, which explores the tension between settled and rootless peoples. Deleuze and Guattari, indeed, introduced the concept of striation in a bid to distinguish between sedentary and nomadic lives. The normalising function not only of the law, but also of social institutions such as work, is much emphasised in Welcome, and the effects of economic and institutional striation are evident everywhere. One of the film’s most striking sequences is the arrival of the lorry with the stowaways into the port of Calais at night; the long shot reveals an intricate but perfectly functional system of suspended roads, which look like a maze of illuminated strips. Here, as in the other films, trade and money regulate life and movement, and goods travel much more easily than people do. Even the sea in Welcome is striated; each time it is framed, ferries and ships cross the shot. Yet, the sea is also a fluid, ‘smooth’ space, which suggests the possibility of renegotiating identities, travelling, communicating and starting anew. While Bilal’s second attempt at crossing is not visualised, the final one is. However, there is no ‘hitting the road’ here, with all that the topos implies and that is so fundamental to the road movie’s kinetic poetics and aesthetics. No exhilarating extra-diegetic music elicits strong emotions; no sense of liberation from inertia is experienced; no exploration of transforming panoramas is offered. The audience’s expectations of the genre are frustrated. The harrowing sequence of Bilal’s swim towards England is set in a leaden, cold sea; framed from above in long shot, Bilal looks like a fragile if purposeful dot in the homogeneous expanse of the sea, in which no signposting, no directions, no landmarks indicate the way and reassure us as to the traveller’s position. Accompanied by an ominous, sad score, Bilal’s solitude and vulnerability as a clandestine migrant are further highlighted by his encounters with large ships. The water in which he floats is no amniotic fluid; there is no rebirth, no redemption for the Kurdish teenager in the English Channel. Water is the most significant element of Welcome, and replaces the road almost completely; it is not only in the sea but also and more extensively in the swimming pool, indeed, that the film’s travelling takes place. Bilal covers many kilometres swimming back and forth, day and night, in the pool. This, however, is no forward movement; rather, it is an incessant coming and going which is ultimately solipsistic, repetitive and somewhat obsessive. No release of tension is ever achieved in Welcome. Unfortunately for Bilal, despite its physical malleability, uncontainability and permeability, the sea has been transformed into a hard border. As he approaches the English coast, he is spotted by a British police boat patrolling the coast, and dies tragically in the desperate attempt to escape arrest. Welcome’s ending makes the point that if we deprive clandestine immigrants of their rights and consider them juridically as ‘inexistent nonpersons’, in Balibar’s words, what we actually do is “transform the way we control frontiers, under the pretext of checking traffic in human labour. This control instead becomes a true war, on land and sea, and is waged right up to the borders of the Schengen countries, and its victims can be counted in thousands of dead bodies” (Balibar 2003:

14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE 

261

38). When, at the end of his tragic swim towards England, he is spotted by the police only 800 metres from the coast, Bilal turns and seems to want to swim back towards Calais. It is of course a gesture born of despair, but one that evokes the image of Bilal compulsively swimming back and forth in the pool, going nowhere. Bilal dies as a victim in a war in which the police feel entitled to chase him pitilessly until he drowns.

Conclusion What these road movies problematise, then, through their emphasis on metaphorical borderlands and their scenarios of stasis, circularity and repetition, is the view of both the North and of Western Europe as the cradle of ever-­growing civilisation and democracy and as the home of a progress which is identified with unstoppable forward motion. Prioritising immobility and the tension of stasis, circularity and repetition over the catharsis of movement, they express deep social tensions, both in considering the position of those—migrant workers, postcolonial ‘inheritors’, and refugees—who contemplate border crossings and the nature of these borders. Questions of power and rights arise, particularly in relation to the physical, social and legal barriers to transit which these films dramatise and in the context of the challenges they present to the discourses of globalisation which dominated the last decades of the twentieth century. France, here, is repositioned away from the ‘centre’ of Europeanness; while its colonial history remains visible, it is either evacuated from the films as a distinct site of identity and meaning or situated merely as another ‘borderland’ which must be crossed. Indeed, what we are given to see in each of these films is far from the idealised borderless Europe of free movement. Instead, the question of how to cross borders constitutes an almost insurmountable problem for all non-Western characters. Europe looks very much like a fortress here—though its borders are not completely impermeable. What is especially significant is the way in which these films challenge Eurocentrism and, consequently, the idea of France’s hegemonic position within Europe; in fact, they reposition the country as a sort of borderland. Even when it is the chosen destination for emigration, its harsh reality clashes so profoundly with the characters’ dreams that it compellingly suggests the end of France’s centrality to an idea of Europe based on the inheritance of the Enlightenment and on discourses that equate modernity with progress and liberal capitalism with democracy.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. How does the road movie, as a genre, lend itself to considerations of Europe and what it means to consider oneself ‘European’? 2. Do you see differences between the European road movie, as described here, and the American road movie?

262 

L. RASCAROLI

3. The writer says “It is not necessary for a film to include images of a border in order to evoke it”. What does she mean? Do you agree? 4. How do these films ask us to consider differences between the movement of people and goods across international borders? 5. Can films like these function as political statements and tools, and if so how? Do they offer any solutions to the problem of borders? 6. How do these films represent globalisation and ideas of ‘old Europe’ and ‘new Europe’?

References Balibar, Étienne. 2003. Europe, An ‘Unimagined’ Frontier of Democracy (Trans. F. Collins). Diacritics 33 (3/4): 36–44. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Eder, Klaus. 2006. Europe’s Borders: The Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of Europe. European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 255–271. Gachechiladze, Revaz. 1995. The New Georgia: Space, Society, Politics. London: UCL Press. Graffy, Julian. 2004. Since Otar Left. Sight and Sound 14 (6): 68–69. Lydie, Virginie. 2008. Paroles clandestines: les étrangers en situation irrégulière en France. Paris: Syros-Cimade. Marshall, Bill. 2007. André Téchiné. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newman, David. 2006. Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue. European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 171–186. Petek, Polona. 2010. Highways, Byways and Dead Ends: Towards a Non-Eurocentric Cosmopolitanism through Yugonostalgia and Slovenian Cinema. New Review of Film and Television Studies 8: 218–232. Tarr, Carrie. 2007. The Porosity of the Hexagon: Border Crossings in Contemporary French Cinema. Studies in European Cinema 4 (1): 7–20. Wilson, Emma. 2009. After Kieślowski: Voyages in European Cinema. In After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, ed. Stephen Woodward, 89–98. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

CHAPTER 15

German Film Comedy in the ‘Berlin Republic’: Wildly Successful and a Lot Funnier than You Think Jill E. Twark

Definitions Incongruity Theory The theory of humour put forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer indicating that the juxtaposition of concepts, words, or objects, which normally would not appear together, can be a source of humour and provoke laughter. Sympathetic Humour When humour is used to draw compassion towards characters whom the audience perhaps laughs at but at the same time feels connected to, because the awkward or absurd situations the characters face resemble the audience members’ own life experiences or experiences to which they can relate. Heimatfilm A film genre from Germany and Austria that expresses emotional attachment to an idealised ‘homeland’ (Heimat) or region of the country such as Bavaria. Most popular in West Germany from the end of World War II until the 1970s, J. E. Twark (*) Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_15

263

264 

J. E. TWARK

this genre is still relevant in the German filmmaking industry today, though often parodied for its sentimentality and melodramatic plots. Ostalgie The neologism Ostalgie is a contraction of the German words for ‘east’ and ‘nostalgia’. Since the mid-1990s it has been used often pejoratively to refer to the longing of many eastern Germans for the stability and familiarity of their former country and for their beloved cultural and consumer products as tokens of their lost identity and connection to home.

Introduction Comedy is currently the most successful domestic film genre in Germany (Germany Movie Index 2020), and twenty-first-century German film comedies display tremendously diverse topics and strategies of humour. The ‘stiff German’ or ‘Nazi’ stereotype can still often be found as the butt of jokes, but “shifting gender roles, the new generation gap, the struggles of multiculturalism, and the problems of German reunification” are also common themes (Roxborough 2018). Despite these multiple offerings, most film comedies from Germany have not reached a wide audience abroad. This limited reception is partly due to language and cultural barriers but also the fact that many contemporary German comedies must be understood as products of this country’s twentiethcentury history. Most major German-language comedy discourses and genres are rooted firmly in history, despite the films having been created in the past two decades. These discourses and genres are discussed here in order of their appearance, beginning with depictions of the effects of German reunification and the socialist East German past in the first section. ‘Hitler humour’ parodies of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in the second section are followed by a third section on transcultural comedies mostly made by Turkish German directors and scriptwriters or by other immigrants and their offspring. The fourth section features contemporary film comedies that focus on present-­day Germany but frequently also reference past historical events, figures, and literary or filmic texts. The conclusion reflects on recent developments in German comedy.

Film Comedies of German Reunification and East Germany The most profound historical event to have affected the Central and Eastern European film industry in general, and German film comedy in particular, was the end of the Cold War. This event was triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which led to the swift reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, and to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. Because its capital was moved from Bonn to Berlin, post-wall Germany is often referred to as the ‘Berlin Republic’.

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

265

Reunification spawned many film comedies dealing with the shift in East Germany from a rather dictatorial socialism to a democratic, free-market society, as this nation merged with the much larger, wealthier West Germany. Many eastern Germans lost their jobs during this transformation and needed to assimilate to the western German legal system; a capitalist economy with less job security and more competition; and new freedoms of travel, speech, and religion, among others. Filmmakers tried to capture this transition by focusing on divergences between eastern German and western culture that lend themselves to humour, as well as on characteristics of East Germany that in hindsight appeared absurd. These film comedies often take the form of road movies, foregrounding cultural differences by transporting protagonists to previously off-limits western locations, or are set in the private microcosm of the protagonists’ family home. Precursors of later reunification comedies are the zany road movie Go, Trabi, Go—The Saxons Are Coming, directed by Peter Timm (1991), who grew up in East Germany, and its sequel Go, Trabi, Go 2—That Was the Wild East, by western German directors Wolfgang Büld and Reinhard Klooss (1992). Both depict an East German family struggling to cope with humiliating and unjust experiences following German reunification. The family’s exaggerated naiveté and cultural conflicts with West Germans highlight the materialism of the West and emphasise their good nature and need to adapt quickly to their new circumstances. This now standard characterisation of the naïve, inexperienced East German having to face unfamiliar customs and attitudes in the West is carried forward in the touching 2003 road movie Schultze Gets the Blues by western German director Michael Schorr. Schorr’s main character is a pitiable unemployed East German salt miner who plays the accordion and travels to the US South in search of zydeco music. Schultze Gets the Blues displays less overbearing humour, in which East German encounters with various US Southerners appear enriching rather than conflictual. A third reunification road movie is western German director Markus Goller’s Friendship! (2010), which portrays two youths who fly from Berlin to New York then drive to San Francisco to find a long-lost father, strip dancing and selling fake pieces of the Berlin Wall to finance their trip. Friendship! received mixed reviews for its inanity and sparse dialogue but nevertheless became the most-watched German film of the year 2010 in its domestic market. Reunification road movie comedies like these confront East-West inequalities and respond to “the anxiety of loss and disorientation” (Mittman 2003: 344) by implying that “there are no answers inside of ‘Germany,’ as it is currently configured, to unification and its representational dilemmas. That they do so while making their audiences laugh is perhaps a sign of the utopian desire to unite, rather than polarise, their East-West German audiences” (Mittman 2003: 344). These films take protagonists abroad to distance them from the immediate shock of having lost their nation and, at the same time, allow them to reassess their identities as new citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. The fact that many were made by western Germans, however, tells us perhaps

266 

J. E. TWARK

more about the western imagination of East Germans than the actual East German experience. For East German perspectives, one must look to Andreas Dresen with his popular comedies Grill Point (2002) and Summer in Berlin (2005), Carsten Fiebeler with Kleinruppin Forever (2004), Andreas Kleinert, or Dörte Franke. Another type of reunification comedy satirises life in socialist East Germany— officially called the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—which existed from 1949 to 1990. Two of these comedies, released in 1999, belong to a wave of Ostalgie films criticised for trivialising the GDR’s strict regime: Sun Alley by Leander Haußmann and Heroes Like Us by Sebastian Peterson, both based on Thomas Brussig’s screenplays. Sun Alley presents a teenage clique with screwball antics and sympathetic humour in a comic book aesthetic that preserves memories of daily life in the GDR and caricatures the extreme measures taken to avoid state censorship and other forms of oppression. Though making light of their repressive political situation, its comic heroes “validate a history of youth culture by edging out, albeit not completely erasing, their national history” (Kutch 2011: 219). Ostalgie films feed into a desire to be reminded of the past, to perceive this past as having value, and occasionally to romanticise it as self-defence against western prejudices. One important Ostalgie tragicomedy is Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). Featured in film textbook (Reimer and Zachau 2005; Borra and Mader-Koltay 2006; Brockmann 2010; Zachau et al. 2014), Good Bye, Lenin! inverts the outward-looking road movie format to focus on one family’s unusual fictional reunification experience in Berlin. Here, the enthusiastically socialist protagonist is bedridden after having suffered from a coma that prevented her from learning about the fall of the Wall. The film’s humour derives from her son Alexander’s painstaking efforts to reconstruct the GDR in her bedroom so she does not suffer a life-threatening shock. In one recreated television (TV) news report, West Germans are shown fleeing into East Germany purportedly to have a better life under socialism. Good Bye, Lenin! constructs a utopian dream of socialist society that “deals with reality and the perception of reality, communicated through TV images. It challenges viewers who got used to seeing the conventional perception of the events following the fall of the Berlin Wall as liberating, and applauding the West as victorious” (Reimer and Zachau 2005: 253). Like other Ostalgie films, it manipulates cultural memory to provoke reflection on what it meant to live, and attempt to live well, under a repressive and economically disadvantaged regime. A more recent drama comedy, In Times of Fading Light (2017) by Matti Geschonnek, depicts a family microcosm less nostalgically, peering into the personal life of an embittered socialist government official. Reunification comedies like these keep East Germany alive in collective memory by providing insights into the experiences of its social groups and institutions. Another such institution was the East German army, put through the comic wringer in NVA (2005), the acronym for Nationale Volksarmee, or National People’s Army, by Leander Haußmann. An inexperienced East

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

267

German border guard is also the hero in the romantic comedy Beloved Berlin Wall by Peter Timm (2009). The romantic comedy convention of a complicated East-West courtship, rife with humorous cultural and political conflicts, ends in a successful allegorical pairing as Germany unites with their symbolic marriage. Two further Ostalgie films from 2017 are the action comedy Scouts of Peace by Robert Thalheim, in which a former Stasi secret police spy is sent on a new mission with his old team in the year 2015, and Forwards Ever! by Franziska Meletzky, which rewrites the story of how the aging GDR leader Erich Honecker contributed to the fall of the Wall. Both films treat history and aging playfully. Film comedies with characters and plots set in East Germany, or revolving around the transition from two Germanies to one, bear witness to this historical shift and reveal difficulties of life in both. They entertain by both mocking and drawing sympathy towards East German protagonists and their struggles to survive in a repressive socialist regime or to adapt to new sociopolitical and personal circumstances under capitalism.

‘Hitler Humour’: Film Comedies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis With the border between their respective nations removed, East and West Germans became more open and willing to speak not only about their differences but also about their shared National Socialist (Nazi) past and the Holocaust (Niven 2001: 1–5). In the 1990s, media events and controversies surrounding Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1995), and the ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ travelling military exhibit raised awareness and taught Germans about Nazi crimes and other, related historical events. This new openness engendered much humour in popular culture, including film comedies that parody and satirise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler and the Nazis have often been parodied, for example, in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967), or the GDR Holocaust film by Frank Beyer, Jacob the Liar (1974). Some prominent recent cases of German mockery of Hitler are Walter Moers’ comic book Little Asshole and its sequels (1990–2001)—turned into the 1997 animated film Little Asshole by Michael Schaack and Veit Vollmer—and Adolf, The Nazi Pig (1998–2006), which led to the chart-hitting music video I’m Sitting in My Bunker by Walter Moers and Thomas Pigor (2005). Heated debates accompany nearly any representation of Hitler in Germany, because they are often considered too sympathetic, but in the twenty-first century, provoking laughter at the Führer has become common there (see Rosenfeld 2015). The cultural phenomenon of ‘Hitler humour’ emerged from, and responds critically to, the German discourse called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the Nazi past), which comprises “Germans’ introspection into

268 

J. E. TWARK

their nation’s guilt and responsibility for the Third Reich’s atrocities, as well as their continuing investment in renegotiating the significance of this past and its legacy in contemporary German culture” (Orich and Strzelczyk 2011: 296). It includes scholarly efforts to document historical facts as well as non-fictional and fictional representations of related events or people—even those found in film comedies. Ongoing since the end of World War II, this work increased in intensity in the late twentieth century. Along with the overarching project of dealing with the past, ridiculing Hitler combines education with entertainment and “history with the contemporary desire to consume it in a novel, palatable form.… Hitler humor has thus become a potent, twofold vehicle seemingly allowing Germans, on the one hand, to work continuously through their nation’s guilt and, on the other, to find comic relief from the burden of the past by experiencing it in a carefree, amusing format” (Orich and Strzelczyk 2011: 296–297). Two major ‘Hitler humour’ film comedies are Swiss Jewish director Dani Levy’s My Führer—The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), which was the first non-animated feature film comedy of Hitler in Germany, and David Wnendt’s Look Who’s Back (2015). Levy’s humour in My Führer is based on superficial incongruities such as altering Hitler’s physical appearance and behaviour to contradict real-life audio-visual images of him. The film’s glaring moral problem, as with other representations of Hitler, is that Levy’s approach is too benign. According to the ‘superiority theory’ of humour, spectators laugh if they feel superior to someone considered to be inferior (Ewen 2001: 38–39). Using humour in a ‘revenge fantasy’ to present Hitler as inferior to the film’s viewers should thus be laudable. Feeling superior does not prevent viewers from sympathising with comic characters made to suffer, however, even if they are Hitler (Rosenfeld 2015: 270–273). Look Who’s Back introduces similar pitfalls in its fantastical representation of a charismatic Führer rising from the dead in the twenty-first century. Wnendt shows how Hitler might be perceived today if he came back to life and interacted with various people in Germany. As ‘counterfactual history’ (Troupin 2018: 107), presenting no new facts about the Nazi past or Hitler, this film “provides a glimpse into widely held social assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations about Hitler, the Nazi past, contemporary Fascist currents, the effects of late capitalism, the refugee crisis, the discourse of political correctness, and other social, cultural, and political actualities” (Troupin 2018: 107). Viewers learn more from Look Who’s Back about contemporary Germany than about the historical figure of Hitler. What ties ‘Hitler humour’ films together is the attempt to ‘humanise’ Hitler in order to understand him (Rosenfeld 2015: 234). These comedies provoke controversy in Germany for exaggerating and thus trivialising him and the crimes of the Third Reich. Their significance for German film history lies in the directors’ attempts to bring Hitler down to earth, reduce his emotional power, and undermine support for him and other dictators.

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

269

Transcultural Comedies Transcultural film comedies have also proliferated in Germany in the twenty-­ first century. Like East-meets-West reunification films, transcultural comedies are often ‘culture clash comedies’. Depicting people from two or more cultures interacting in their daily lives, these comedies expose glaring and often amusing incongruities between divergent worldviews and customs, but also commonalities and fears of the ‘Other’ they share, as well as the desire for belonging to family or home. Various nationalities of immigrants to Germany and their offspring, often in tandem with ethnic Germans, began making feature-length transcultural comedies in the early 2000s. Prior to then, foreigners and immigrants had been depicted in German comedies in the clichéd role of the awkward, exaggerated clown with broken German.1 The fact that many ethnic minorities, especially Turkish Germans, have now lived in Germany for over 50 years as invited guest workers, and begotten rather well-integrated heirs, has resulted in comedies that explore both superficial and fundamental differences between ethnic minority and German majority cultures as well as seek common ground. Transcultural comedies have been made by and about various ethnic minorities, including Jewish Germans. One such film, Go for Zucker (2004), was made by the Swiss-born director of Mein Führer, Dani Levy, who has lived in Berlin since 1980. Go for Zucker was the first German-language film to break the taboo of using comedy to deal with Jewish identity construction in Germany after World War II (Lenné Jones 2011: 53). Another Berlin transplant, the Russian Jewish author Wladimir Kaminer, originally from Moscow, had his autobiographical short stories depicting his awkward immigrant experiences turned into the film Russian Disco by Oliver Ziegenbalg (2012). Sherel Peleg’s short film We’re Back Again (2018) deals similarly with the Israeli-Jewish immigrant experience in Germany with humour. Around 100,000 Jewish people currently live in Germany, and the cultural conflicts in these films highlight how they are viewed and treated. Among transcultural German comedies, Turkish German films dominate in both quantity and audience success. Turkish German immigrants and their offspring make up the largest ethnic minority in Germany by far, comprising 2.8 million residents out of 82.3 million total (Göttsche 2018: 32). One of the first major Turkish German comedies was the 2000 romantic comedy/road movie In July, directed by the now superstar director Fatih Akin (born in 1973 in Hamburg to Turkish immigrant parents). Three ‘culture clash comedies’ are the wacky 2004 collaboration between director Torsten Wacker and scriptwriter Kerim Pamuk called Süperseks; Kebab Connection (2005), directed by Anno Saul from a screenplay by Fatih Akin and Ruth Toma; and the tempestuous wedding satire Evet, I Do!, directed by Sinan Akkus (2008). The latter two films revamp the popular Turkish German topics of love relationships and weddings by pairing Turkish and German partners, producing humorous cultural conflicts. It is noteworthy that Fatih Akin called his 2009 crime story/

270 

J. E. TWARK

romantic comedy Soul Kitchen, set in his hometown Hamburg, a Heimatfilm, indicating he feels at home in Germany (Zander 2009). Many of these comedies are based on the romantic comedy conventions of the ‘unlikely couple film’ (Wartenberg 1999: 7) and thus “offer criticism of existing social norms and power structures by mobilizing sympathy for the transgressive couple, whose love represents a human value that transcends the sociocultural differences and prejudices that the couple overcomes” (Berghahn 2012: 23). Most transcultural German film comedies, like reunification comedies, deploy humour to spotlight and reconcile cultural differences. Three successful transcultural comedies from the past decade are Yasemin Şamdereli’s tragicomic family history Almanya: Welcome to Germany (2011), Bora Dağtekin’s romantic comedy Turkish for Beginners (2012), and Fatih Akin’s coming-of-age road movie Goodbye Berlin (2016). Transcultural filmmakers like these interrogate German governmental, economic, and cultural dominance in treating and representing immigrants and their offspring as a distinct group. They triangulate the East-West German binary found in reunification films and “foster a tolerance for ambiguity and diversity” (Morreall 2016), thereby promoting acceptance of the Other in German-language culture. Despite this potentially positive influence, transcultural comedies in Germany should now be considered against the backdrop of the 2015 European refugee crisis. The massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants from war-torn and impoverished countries seeking asylum has, for example, led to the rise of nationalist parties in Germany and other European countries. Germany’s admittance of the vast majority of these immigrants elicited an accompanying wave of anti-immigrant sentiments there (see Holmes and Castañeda 2016).

Film Comedies of Contemporary Germany Film comedies that poke fun at and critique contemporary Germany satirically cover a wide range of topics and genres. These films were made for entertainment but also help viewers understand unique and universal aspects of German culture and society. The mock-Western Manitou’s Shoe (2001), directed by television and radio comedian Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig, for example, is a screwball comedy without higher aspirations that absurdly transports twentieth-­ century US and German popular culture to a bygone Native American setting. The TV premiere of Manitou’s Shoe garnered the private German television station Pro 7 its all-time highest viewership because it spoofs novels by the beloved German author Karl May and previous German Western films. Herbig has since become a prominent director of film parodies such as Dreamship Surprise (2004), a hilarious take-off of Star Trek and other outer-space odysseys. The box-office hit romantic comedies Rabbit Without Ears (2007) and its sequel Rabbit Without Ears 2 (2009), both directed by famous German actor and director Til Schweiger, highlight problems produced by fluctuating gender roles and the need for work-life balance in contemporary courtship. They

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

271

satirise the German tabloid press for its sensationalist journalism and cut-throat workplace policies. The Ice-Skater (Markus Imboden, 2015) comments critically on Germany’s leading role in European politics in a caricature of German Chancellor Angela Merkel using ice skating as therapy for a head injury resulting in amnesia. Four fascinating character studies among this diverse bunch are the vigilante justice film Quiet as a Mouse by Marcus Mittermeier (2004); Grave Decisions, a delightful Heimatfilm by Marcus H. Rosenmüller (2006); the feminist comedy The Hairdresser by Doris Dörrie (2010); and the generational conflict comedy Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade (2016). These films encourage reflection on the unexpected results of personal choices and uncontrollable misfortunes, as well as on the reasons for societal rejection or acceptance for one’s actions, personality, or physiognomy. Toni Erdmann, nominated for a Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is set outside Germany in Bucharest, Romania and additionally critiques globalisation, capitalism, and careerism. Director Ade condemns the decisions of female German business consultant Ines Conradi and the corporations Ines advises that purchase and downsize companies to maximise profits. This critique is embedded in a father-daughter generational conflict fuelled by Ines’ workaholic career ambitions, which cause her to neglect her family in Germany. Actress Sandra Hüller, who plays Ines, said in an interview: “I think the desperation of the people is the origin of comedy” (Silverstein 2017). The humour in Toni Erdmann results from the incongruity produced by desperate acts: Ines’ distressed father Winfried attempts to snap Ines out of her desperate career obsession by donning an outlandish wig and fake teeth to impersonate a motivational business coach named Toni Erdmann and follow her around as she works and socialises. Figure 15.1 shows the two after he has handcuffed his wrist to hers, claiming he lost the key, so she must take him with

Fig. 15.1  Winfried, posing as Toni Erdmann, handcuffed to Ines

272 

J. E. TWARK

her. His smile contrasts with her frown in the image, as this absurd scene contrasts with the otherwise bland European street in the background. Humour is produced here by means of surprise and embarrassment. The unexpected keeps happening unexpectedly in this unique film that adds global economic critiques and clowning to the German comedy inventory. Three other comedies that scrutinise profound issues of concern in contemporary Germany are Jan Ole Gerster’s A Coffee in Berlin (2012), Dietrich Brüggemann’s Heil (2015), and Simon Verhoeven’s Welcome to Germany (2016). A Coffee in Berlin uses a slacker film narrative in a stylised black-and-­ white aesthetic to comment on present and past German history. Director Gerster questions the construction of “German identity, cultural memory, and the ways in which Nazi barbarism is represented and perceived by young Germans in the unified Berlin Republic” (Blankenship and Twark 2017: 366). It constitutes an alternative to Hollywood-style heritage films which Eric Rentschler (2000) calls the “cinema of consensus” because many depict history following a similar melodramatic pattern (275). Heil lampoons not only the ideologies, prejudices, and political activities of right-wing radicals and Neonazis in contemporary Germany but also those of left-wing counter-­ protesters, the police, journalists, and middle-class bystanders. Disparaged by German critics for its ludicrous humour and stereotypical characters, Heil nevertheless supplies “a good basis for class discussion on the propagation of right-­ wing ideology in mainstream society, the mechanisms of media discourses, and the challenges facing a modern, civil society” (Busche 2015). Welcome to Germany probes satirically the attitudes of wealthy ethnic Germans towards refugees who do not conform to their rules of etiquette and political correctness. These films provoke thought on identity construction and suitable ways to deal with Neonazism, xenophobia, and immigration in Germany today.

Case Study: Suck Me Shakespeer (Bora Dağtekin, 2013) The boisterous high school comedy Suck Me Shakespeer by Turkish German director Bora Dağtekin is featured here because it showcases various humour strategies to convey social criticism, reworks themes found in earlier German comedies, and was enormously popular in all German-speaking countries. It and its two sequels became a cultural phenomenon as the top-grossing German films in the domestic market in 2013, 2015 (Suck Me Shakespeer 2), and 2017 (Suck Me Shakespeer 3) (Barraclough 2017). Capitalising on the fan base from his television series Turkish for Beginners (2006–2009) and its spin-off film mentioned above, Dağtekin recast the Tunisian Austrian actor Elyas M’Barek in the trilogy’s lead role as a Turkish German character. In the first film, discussed here, the petty criminal played by M’Barek is released from prison after having been incarcerated for robbing a bank, pretends to be a schoolteacher, takes over a wildly disobedient high school class, and converts the students into enthusiastic readers of classical German literature.

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

273

The film’s title, Suck Me Shakespeer, and high school setting contain two key German cultural references. Its original title in Germany, Fack Ju Göhte, contains ‘Göhte’ as an awkward misspelling of the school’s name, ‘Goethe Gesamtschule’, dedicated to the classical German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). His status in Germany rivals that of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. A Gesamtschule is a comprehensive school like those in the US attended by students with all academic abilities. Most German schools are separate institutions offering an occupational, professional, or college-­ preparatory degree. The Gesamtschulen, occupational, and professional schools generally educate economically poorer, marginalised, and immigrant child populations and thus are usually lower performing and more violent than the academically more rigorous college-preparatory schools. Knowing these culturally specific references aids in understanding how humour functions in this film to draw attention to conflicts between underprivileged or neglected pupils and their frustrated teachers. Suck Me Shakespeer has four intertwined plotlines: the overarching high school makeover; the crime story that sets the tale in motion and parallels it; a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist matures with another teacher; and a romantic comedy uniting him and this nerdy female teacher. All plotlines converge in a quintessential ‘happy ending’. The high school transformation relies heavily on physical and verbal slapstick as well as situational humour and scatology (‘toilet humour’). Alan Dale (2000: 3) writes: “a slapstick gag is a physical assault on, or collapse of, the hero’s dignity; as a corollary, the loss of dignity by itself can result in our identifying with the victim. The mishap can be heightened by the plot”. The slapstick humour in Suck Me Shakespeer sets up an ambiguous audience aversion/attraction to the callous male protagonist, Zeki Müller, as he inflicts this violence on schoolchildren. Seeking employment at the Goethe Gesamtschule, Zeki arrives displaying excessively rough manners. He topples the students’ bicycles with his car, threatens them, smears chewing gum on one boy’s shirt, and slams a door on another. His actions elicit shock, disgust, and Schadenfreude—the pleasure experienced when someone else suffers pain or humiliation, partly because we remain unscathed. Because many schoolchildren are depicted as cocky and disobedient, Zeki’s ‘punishment’ of them appears somewhat justified and viewers may sympathise with him. Later in the film, Zeki explains his violent behaviour in a voiceover: he dropped out of the same school because “the streets robbed me of my childhood”. Zeki’s behaviour is thus revealed to be a revenge fantasy in which he punishes others for his failure to graduate and make a better life for himself. After the nerdy teacher Lisi cleverly blackmails Zeki into taking over an unruly class, Dağtekin uses a fast-paced, well-choreographed slapstick sequence to draw yet more audience sympathy towards Zeki and to teach him some valuable lessons. In this scene, the infamous Class 10b has a tripwire release a bucket of tar over Zeki’s head, glues his pants to his chair, then coats him in feathers that blow from his car vents as he tries to escape. This slapstick violence has serious undertones in referencing the practice of ‘tarring and

274 

J. E. TWARK

feathering’, used historically (and in other film comedies) as punishment for a crime or public humiliation. This torment sparks Zeki’s desire to earn the students’ respect and educate them better. Zeki is an unusual slapstick victim because his attractive appearance and physical prowess contrast with the typical slapstick character, who is generally very thin or overweight, like the iconic US film comedians Laurel and Hardy, who are physically disadvantaged. His strength makes him a powerful agent in carrying out disciplinary violence but also a comically incongruous victim of the schoolchildren’s pranks. The film’s crime story plotline is propelled by Zeki’s need to unearth the stolen cash that his girlfriend, a strip-dancer, buried for him in the foundation of the Goethe school’s new gymnasium and that he needs to pay a debt owed to the vicious strip-club boss. Here, the humour is based on exaggerated stock characters, such as the sexually objectified strip-dancer with a good heart and her mean boss. The third plot, transforming Zeki from a gangster into an effective teacher, constitutes a Bildungsfilm or coming-of-age narrative. As he grows, Zeki acts ever more cultivated and caring, so that the humour progresses from violent slapstick antics to a more sophisticated humour requiring reflection, self-awareness, and respect. One way he convinces the students to abandon their drug-dealing career plans is to take them on a field trip to visit a drug addict and a family of welfare recipients whose daughter is a prostitute and son is a Neonazi (see Fig. 15.2). While the Neonazi sleeps, Zeki threatens comically to wake him by pinching his nipple while his group of apprehensive multi-ethnic students looks on. The excessive amount and large format of the Nazi paraphernalia in the Neonazi’s bedroom, seen here, marks him as a fanatic whom the students rightfully fear, whereas his temporarily harmless posture asleep at Zeki’s feet produces humorous suspense. Many contemporary German comedies incorporate Hitler or Nazi references to deflate their power as iconic figures. Hitler or the Nazis are often mocked or invoked as insults for characters who act in stereotypically ‘uptight German’ ways.

Fig. 15.2  Zeki threatens to wake a Neonazi as his students look on

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

275

The final plotline consists of the unlikely couple love story of the ill-­ mannered bank robber Zeki and the overzealous teaching intern Lisi Schnabelstedt. Their love story follows romantic comedy conventions, relying on witty conversations and the ‘comedy of repulsion’ (Richardson 2012) to reveal their weaknesses but gradually bind them together. Kartina Richardson (2012) defines ‘repulsion’ in film comedy as emerging from the “cultivation of moments of sincerity toward increasingly obsolete cultural norms: ideas of success, professionalism, sexuality, masculinity, entertainment or social interaction”. This sincerity “causes excruciating discomfort, for witnessing someone else’s belief in something we’ve decided is a joke, is pure vulnerability” (Richardson 2012). Filmmaker Dağtekin has Lisi exhibit a gut-wrenching vulnerability in her interactions with Zeki and her students, who play pranks on her such as smearing faeces on a door handle. She attempts to act cool, for example, by peppering her German with bungled English expressions: instead of “don’t fuck with me”, she says, “don’t suck with me”. Like Zeki, she suffers various mishaps such as being accidentally shot in the backside with a hormone dart during a field trip to a farm. Her vulnerabilities eventually warm Zeki’s heart, completing the romantic comedy arc from antipathy to attraction. Though from different backgrounds, both characters undergo similar growth, albeit in different facets of their personalities and thinking. Lisi predictably teaches Zeki effective pedagogical strategies, manners, and grammar, and Zeki converts her from an uptight nerd to a self-confident woman. The film’s ‘happy ending’ transforms Zeki and Lisi along with their students. This film is significant for transcultural German film comedy history because, although it portrays characters of multiple ethnicities, its focus is socioeconomic and not transcultural conflicts. Dağtekin tellingly gives Zeki Müller an ethnically blended name, juxtaposing the Turkish ‘Zeki’ with the German ‘Müller’. The verbal slapstick in Zeki’s interactions with Class 10b produce further ethnic ambiguity. Introducing himself as ‘Mr. Müller’, Zeki deflects any insinuation he might not be German. When asked by a pupil: “Why’s your name Müller? You don’t look like a Müller. You’re a brother, man,” Zeki responds: “Cut the Turko shit. An F for you.” Zeki similarly diverts a social worker’s potential prejudices when she asks: “Are you from the Mideast?” by responding: “Yes, but no fear. I don’t shoot.” Suck Me Shakespeer adopts the transcultural film convention of the romantic comedy subplot contrasting two characters from different backgrounds, but their cultural differences derive from their unequal educational levels and deficient social skills instead of their ethnicities. Dağtekin avoids transcultural clichés by focusing on the detrimental effects on students and teachers of social class divisions, drug abuse, bullying, and other problems found not only in Germany but also in other nations. The fast-paced slapstick choreography, situation comedy, and “comedy of repulsion” in Suck Me Shakespeer produce a utopian fantasy that strives to create an ideal world where no cultural and economic divisions exist (Schröder 2017). Though morally questionable in showcasing and trivialising violence and humiliation, it encourages reflection on the teaching profession, the role of the humanities in education, and the state of contemporary youth culture.

276 

J. E. TWARK

Conclusion The German comedy film industry takes creative approaches to German history, contemporary German life, and multicultural interactions among ethnic Germans, various ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Though fundamentally German, these films respond to the ways our world is becoming ever more globally connected. They tell universal stories of displacement, identity (re)construction, and prejudice, as well as reference historical events and figures from World War II to the recent refugee crisis, and from Goethe to Angela Merkel. They align with the German saying: “Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht” (“humour is when one laughs anyway”). New German comedies continue to carry forward the discourses and genres discussed above. Veteran filmmaker Sönke Wortmann’s The First Name (2018), based on the French drama comedy What’s in a Name? (2012), probes what it means to live in Germany today with the Nazi legacy. Another experienced director, Doris Dörrie, sends a young German woman to Japan to work with the fictional non-profit organisation Clowns4Help and bring laughter to the victims of the March 2011 tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Greetings from Fukushima (2016). Dörrie’s pioneering efforts raised comedy’s popularity in Germany in the late 1980s and 1990s. In an interview following her comedic success with Men… (1985), Dörrie supplies clues as to what boosted comedy in Germany (see also Brockmann 2000). After having studied in the US in the early 1970s, Dörrie observed: “What I realized when I came back is that we Germans don’t have a real feel for humor—or any sense of humor at all”. Mentioning the rich Jewish German humour tradition from the Weimar Republic that was abolished by the Nazis, she says further: “The uptight Germans of the Federal Republic […] are afraid to engage in repartee because joking means revealing a part of yourself. The Germans have dreadfully little identity—and identity requires a lot of humor […]. Everybody can be trained, though, to a certain sense of humor, so maybe I got a certain training in America” (Markham 1986: 19). Dörrie, Wortmann, and fellow comedy directors born since the 1950s have been open to influences from the past and other nations. They thereby created a large domestic film comedy market in Germany. Now that reunification has progressed, and the Berlin Republic is settling into its new identity, it is able to turn its focus in comedy films towards a wide variety of social issues. This more stable identity opens Germans to the revealing of fissures and weaknesses in their society. Comedy’s expansion there can thus be considered a sign of German normalisation: Germans no longer feel the need to take themselves so seriously and are willing to approach challenges and divisions through the lens of humour. This genre’s success also derives from the fact that Hollywood comedies have long flooded the German market, creating a desire for home-grown comedies that address local issues. Filmmakers, finding the comical in social issues facing Germany today, are putting them into a format that has mass appeal. This success also has much to do with the

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

277

German film industry not taking itself as seriously as in the past (as a primarily high-brow socially critical and educational medium) but instead re-embracing its value as entertainment that can concurrently highlight social and economic issues. Many German comedies from the 1950s to 1980s are primarily slapstick and markedly apolitical, but more recent ones have rediscovered comedy’s ability to be engaging, meaningful, and funny at the same time. It will be interesting to see how Germans continue to develop their ‘funny bones’.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. What topics do German comedies poke fun at? What types of audience reactions might the directors wish to provoke and why? 2. Which strategies of humour do German film directors use in the film(s) you have watched and for what purposes? 3. What do viewers of German film comedies learn about history as well as contemporary life in Germany? 4. How do German comedies use humour to create and to call into question the cultural or socioeconomic Other? 5. How do German film comedies compare with other film comedies you have seen? Discuss their strategies of humour, character portraits, social criticism, notions of ‘political correctness’, and controversial approaches to politically or socially sensitive topics.

Note 1. For examples of how this tendency expresses itself, see the Filmportal.de article “What You Looking At? and The Comedy of Immigration: The Foreigner as Laughing Stock and Walking Cliché.”

References Barraclough, Leo. 2017. German Blockbuster Comedy ‘Fack Ju Goehte 3’ Picked Up by Picture Tree. Variety, 9 November. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/fackju-goehte-3-picture-tree-1202610004/. Accessed 4 December 2019. Berghahn, Daniela. 2012. My Big Fat Turkish Wedding: From Culture Clash to Romcom. In Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel, 19–31. New  York and Oxford: Berghahn. Blankenship, Robert, and Jill E. Twark. 2017. Berliner Sonderschule: History, Space, and Humour in Jan Ole Gerster’s Oh Boy (A Coffee in Berlin). Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53 (4): 362–381. Borra, Adriana, and Ruth Mader-Koltay. 2006. German Through Film. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brockmann, Stephen. 2000. The Politics of German Comedy. German Studies Review 23 (1): 33–51. ———. 2010. A Critical History of German Film. Rochester: Camden House.

278 

J. E. TWARK

Busche, Andreas. 2015. Heil. [Review]. kinofenster.de, 7 July. https://www.kinofenster.de/filme/archiv-film-des-monats/kf1507/kf1507-heil-film/. Accessed 4 December 2019. Dale, Alan. 2000. Comedy is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ewen, E.R. 2001. Hobbes on Laughter. The Philosophical Quarterly 51 (202): 29–40. Filmportal.de. 2019. “What You Looking At?” The Comedy of Immigration: The Foreigner as Laughing Stock and Walking Cliché. https://www.filmportal.de/en/topic/whatyou-looking-at-the-comedy-of-immigration-the-foreigner-as-laughing-stock-andwalking. Accessed 4 December 2019. Germany Movie Index. 2020. The Numbers. https://www.the-numbers.com/ Germany/movies#tab=year. Accessed 4 December 2019. Göttsche, Florian. 2018. Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund. Datenreport 2018. Ein Sozialbericht für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Statistisches Bundesamt, 28–42. Holmes, Seth M., and Heide Castañeda. 2016. Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death. American Ethnologist 42 (1): 12–24. Kaminer, Wladimir. 2002. Russian Disco: Tales of Everyday Lunacy in the Streets of Berlin. Trans. Michael Huise. London: Ebury. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Infomotions/ProQuest EBook (orig. 1790). Kutch, Lynn. 2011. The Comic Book Humor of Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee. In Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jill E. Twark, 202–223. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Lenné Jones, Susanne. 2011. Who’s Laughing at Whom?: Jewish Humor in Dani Levy’s Alles auf Zucker! In Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jill E. Twark, 53–75. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Markham, James. 1986. Behind ‘Men’ Stands a Woman with a Sense of Humor. The New  York Times, 27 July, 19, 25. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1986/07/27/issue.html. Accessed 4 December 2019. Mittman, Elizabeth. 2003. Fantasizing Integration and Escape in the Post-Wende Road Movie. In Light Motives: German Popular Cinema in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 326–348. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Morreall, John. 2016. Philosophy of Humor. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/. Accessed 4 December 2019. Niven, Bill. 2001. Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich. London: Routledge. Orich, Annika, and Florentine Strzelczyk. 2011. ‘Steppende Nazis mit Bildungsauftrag’: Marketing Hitler Humor in Post-Unification Germany. In Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jill E.  Twark, 294–330. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Reimer, Robert C., and Reinhard Zachau. 2005. German Culture Through Film: An Introduction to German Cinema. Newburyport, MA: Focus. Rentschler, Eric. 2000. From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus. In Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, 260–277. New York: Routledge.

15  GERMAN FILM COMEDY IN THE ‘BERLIN REPUBLIC’: WILDLY SUCCESSFUL… 

279

Richardson, Kartina. 2012. Tim and Eric’s Comedy of Repulsion. In Their New Movie, the Cult Comics Push the Limits of Human Vulnerability – and Generate Laughs from Nerves. [Review]. Salon, 17 February. http://www.salon. com/2012/02/17/tim_and_erics_comedy_of_revulsion/. Accessed 4 December 2019. Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. 2015. Hi Hitler: How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roxborough, Scott. 2018. KINO Favorites: Top 10 German Comedies. [Review]. Deutsche Welle. 23 October. https://www.dw.com/en/kino-favorites-top-10german-comedies/a-19137820. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. Judith Norman et al. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Schröder, Christoph. 2017. Adieu, Anarchie. Review of Suck Me Shakespeer 3. [Review]. Zeit Online, 25 October. https://www.zeit.de/kultur/film/2017-10/fack-jugoehte-3-film-elyas-m-barek?page=2#comments. Accessed 4 December 2019. Silverstein, Melissa. 2017. Maren Ade and Sandra Hüller Discuss Nudity and Feminism in Oscar Favorite ‘Toni Erdmann.’ Women and Hollywood. 13 January. https://womenandhollywood.com/maren-ade-and-sandra-h%C3%BCller-discuss-nudity-and-feminism-in-oscar-favorite-toni-erdmann-c5abfa0bce3a/. Accessed 4 December 2019. Troupin, Orit Yushinsky. 2018. Fantasy and Its Suspension in an Age of Awkwardness: Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back. Arcadia 53 (1): 105–126. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 1999. Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder, CO: Westview. Zachau, Reinhard, Jeanne Schueller, and Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez. 2014. Cineplex: Intermediate German Language and Culture Through Film. Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge, MA: Focus. Zander, Peter. 2009. Genuss mit Ironie – Fatih Akins ‘Soul Kitchen.’ [Review]. welt.de, 10 September. https://www.welt.de/kultur/article4506128/Genuss-mit-IronieFatih-Akins-Soul-Kitchen.html. Accessed 4 December 2019.

CHAPTER 16

On the Ambiguous Charm of Film Noir: Elle and the New Type of Woman Begoña Gutiérrez-Martínez and Josep Pedro

Definitions Film Noir Film noir is a highly influential genre that crystallised between the 1940s and the late 1950s within the framework of Hollywood cinema. Generally identified with dark urban atmospheres, ambiguous characters and femme fatales, its development was the result of a complex hybridisation between different genres and artistic movements, including hard-boiled American literature, crime films, German expressionism, French poetic realism and existentialism. It may be situated within film mannerism, a transitional mode of representation that transformed the characterisation and formal elements that predominated in Hollywood during the decades between the 1930s and 1950s.

This chapter is framed within the R+I research project “Public Problems and Controversies: Diversity and Participation in the Media Sphere” (Ref: CSO2017-82109R), funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Government of Spain. Pedro wishes to acknowledge the support granted by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Government of Spain, under the postdoctoral contract Juan de la Cierva-Formación at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (FJC2018-036151-I). B. Gutiérrez-Martínez (*) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain J. Pedro Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_16

281

282 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

Neo-noir Neo-noir is a film noir sub-genre that developed in the early 1960s and continues to be produced. It broadly refers to films that draw on some of film noir’s canonical archetypes and conventions, while transforming and adapting them to changing circumstances and contexts. Marked by a greater self-­consciousness and more intense stylistic hybridisation, neo-noir encompasses an even wider variety of films, directors and sub-categories (retro-noir, future-noir, sci-fi/ noir, psychological thriller, crime drama, erotic neo-noir, etc.). Hybridisation In its more straightforward sense, hybridisation refers to “sociocultural processes in which discrete structures or practices that existed separately are combined to generate new structures, objects and practices” (García Canclini 2009: iii). A broader understanding comes from Bakhtin’s dialogic discussion about discourse. Hybridisation is seen as an intrinsic quality of language, as any concrete discourse necessarily draws on and contests previous works, discourses and voices from ongoing traditions. Both conceptual meanings are complementary.

Introduction Film noir is one of the most successful and influential traditions in film history. Its characteristic works and features have been disseminated globally, and its transmedia expansion has been consolidated within contemporary popular culture, particularly in literature, film, music and video games. Though generally identified with its canonical Hollywood incarnation and postwar urban context, film noir’s bond with Europe is particularly relevant and intense due to historical and artistic reasons. Accordingly, this chapter interrogates the Hollywood-European binary by exposing the ways in which the transnational development of film noir has been nurtured and enriched by diverse cultural traditions, identities and languages. While American film noir is primarily linked to ‘hard-boiled’ literature and to the stylisation of Hollywood crime dramas, the notion of European noir emerged from avant-garde aesthetics and existentialist visions of life. Nevertheless, both traditions have influenced each other, contributing to a more complex global genre with distinct national incarnations. The origins of film noir were marked by a variety of artistic influences, including European avant-garde movements such as German expressionism, French poetic realism and Italian Neorealism, as well as by chiaroscuro painting techniques mastered by European artists (Leonardo Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, etc.). Furthermore, its cinematic development is strongly associated with the exile of European filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak, who fled Nazism and contributed decisively

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

283

to the transformation of Hollywood cinema (Schrader 1996: 55–56; Spicer 2010: xli–xlii). Other celebrated European directors who have produced significant noirs or neo-noirs include Michael Curtiz, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tourneur, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Roman Polanski and Paul Verhoeven. Thus, the European contribution to film noir has often been associated with aesthetic innovations, transformative migrations and auteurs, while the United States has been linked to a more consolidated industry and studio system (Schatz 1981; Spicer 2007: 3–7). Moreover, the naming of ‘film noir’ is attributed to French critics such as Jean-Pierre Chartier, Nino Frank (Italian-born), and Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (2002), who—drawing on the literary noir and hard-­ boiled traditions—used the term to describe American films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944) and Double Indemnity (1944). These films were premiered in Paris in the summer of 1946, and they still represent quintessential works of film noir. It is also important to state that there are significant film noir traditions in different European countries, especially in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as in Denmark, Finland and Norway (Spicer 2007, 2010). Other countries, including Portugal, Romania and Czech Republic, also demand further attention. This recognition exemplifies the hybridisation between shared genre conventions and traces of local, regional and national identities that are intimately linked to particular scenarios, languages, accents, characters and sociopolitical situations. As stated by Spicer (2010: xlviii), each European film noir has “different chronologies and displays distinctive national characteristics that reflect a particular nation’s history, its political organisation, its cultural traditions, the state of its film industry, and the strength of its cinematic culture”. Thus, rather than considering film noir “an indigenous American form”, a “self-contained reflection of American cultural preoccupations” and a “unique example of a wholly American film style” (Silver and Ward 1992: 1), this chapter considers film noir as a hybrid transnational genre, marked by diverse forms of appropriations and hybridisations between globalised conventions and different national and cultural identities and circumstances. The aim of the chapter is to analyse European film noir in the twenty-first century, and the case study of Elle (2016) is one means by which this is accomplished. Directed by controversial Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and starring emblematic French actress Isabelle Huppert, Elle is a French, German and Belgian co-production that has captured the attention of critics and audiences, exposing the importance of the noir tradition in Europe and the multiple ways in which it continues to be represented and reformulated. First, the chapter provides a necessary contextualisation of the genre’s nature. Drawing on film theory, particularly on psychoanalytic and feminist film theories, it then ­discusses film noir and neo-noir by focusing on the glamorous femme fatale figure and on the crisis of masculinity represented by dysfunctional male characters. The chapter explores a variety of significant films within the noir tradi-

284 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

tion, particularly the trend set by four cornerstone works that are useful in considering Elle: The Blue Angel (1930), a European proto-noir film; Double Indemnity (1944), a Hollywood film noir masterpiece; and The Fourth Man (1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), Verhoeven’s most relevant previous neonoirs. The analysis of Elle focuses on the dialectics between the female and male characters, and on the examination of style within European neo-noir in the twenty-first century.

The Genre Debate: On the Nature of Film Noir In both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, film noir has provoked intense scholarly debate about its nature. As Hirsch (2008: 71) points out, “noir has been called a ‘sensibility,’ a sub-category of the crime film, a species of psychological thriller, a mystery with a private eye as its hero; but [paradoxically] it has not often been called a genre”. In a seminal article, film critic, writer and director Paul Schrader (1996: 53) states that film noir is not a genre because, unlike the western and gangster genres, it is more defined by subtle qualities of tone and mood than by conventions of setting and conflict. Instead, he defines film noir as a historical period (1944–1958) in which Hollywood films portrayed “the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption” (Schrader 1996: 53). However, the author rightfully discusses film noir features that expose thematic, narrative and mise-en-scène conventions: darker lighting, fatalistic themes, hopeless tone, ambiguous characters and so on. He also states that film noir allowed artists to address previously forbidden themes, and that its conventions were strong enough “to protect the mediocre” (Schrader 1996: 62). Therefore, he inevitably refers to the conventional yet dynamic nature of genre and genre films. Thomas Schatz (1981) argues that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding and analysing Hollywood cinema. He considers genre films a cooperation between artists and audiences who celebrate their collective values and ideals (Schatz 1981: 15). He includes a discussion of film noir within the framework of Hollywood genres, but he is cautious of explicitly labelling it a genre, as the specific chapter is titled under the less widespread and also elusive category ‘hardboiled-detective film’. Significantly, the author emphasises the double meaning of film noir’s ‘darkness’ or ‘blackness’: “visually, these films were darker and compositionally more abstract than most Hollywood films; thematically, they were considerably more pessimistic and brutal in their presentation of contemporary American life” (Schatz 1981: 112). According to communication theories linked to semiotics, anthropology and narratology, genre has a crucial double dimension: it relates both to textual and pragmatic elements. Genre has an acknowledged exemplary character regarding text, but text is rarely a perfect realisation of genre (Castañares 1995: 80). Thus, for Castañares, genre is more often an abstract theoretical category than one defined by case study examinations. Nonetheless, in practice, generic categories enjoy great efficiency, extension and shared knowledge: genres con-

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

285

stitute writing models for authors and horizons of expectations for recipients. Therefore, apart from films, genres consist of “specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema and that interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (Neale 2000: 158). From a pragmatic perspective, genre is inseparable from its spatial-temporal context. Thus, the association between a genre and the diverse participants that intervene in the film’s production and reception is pivotal to understand the heterogeneity of film noir. In the current global scenario, the development and consolidation of nationally defined film noir traditions reveal many shared traits but also present important differences related to narrative, style, culture, identity and geography. The textual and pragmatic understanding of genre acknowledges this complexity, dynamism and multiplicity of genres and sub-genres that are collectively constructed and cyclically revived. “In the realm of art”, as posited by Todorov (1975: 6), “every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species”. Therefore, according to Todorov, a text is not only the realisation of a pre-existing system but also a transformation of it. The concept of hybridisation is useful to understanding film noir and its relevance within European cinema in the twenty-first century. Its use within this particular genre tradition is most clearly exemplified by ‘noir hybrids’ (Spicer 2010): sci-fi/noirs (Metropolis, 1927; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956; Blade Runner, 1982), horror-noirs (Cat People, 1942, 1982; Psycho, 1960; Se7en, 1995), noir comedies (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958; Robbery at 3 O’clock, 1962; The Big Lebowski, 1998) and erotic neo-noirs such as The Fourth Man (1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), both directed by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, whose latest film Elle (2016) is analysed as a case study. In these noir hybrids, hybridisation is generally equated to the combination of two different genres. Thus, the development of new possibilities blurs artistic boundaries, while constantly reformulating the film noir tradition and its ambiguous charm. A broader understanding of hybridisation comes from Bakhtin’s discussion about the dialogic orientation of discourse. His ideas are key to acknowledging the multiple ways in which authors and viewers necessarily draw on and contest previous works, discourses and voices from established, ongoing genre traditions such as film noir: “On all its various routes toward the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction” (Bakhtin 1981: 279). From this perspective, hybridisation is seen as an intrinsic quality of language, as any concrete discourse, having taken “meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads” (Bakhtin 1981: 276). Therefore, it must be acknowledged that, even in its most ideal and supposedly ‘purest’ form, film noir is the product of a complex hybridisation between diverse inherited genres, styles and artistic conventions associated with Europe and the United States. This hybridisation becomes much more pronounced in

286 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

the development of neo-noir, a broader and more diffuse category that is often combined with other generic terms such as thriller, crime, horror, comedy and science fiction. Additionally, the constant reinterpretation and global expansion of film noir’s appealing themes, characters, atmospheres and sounds have opened up new directions and generated further terms like retro-noir, future-­ noir and hyper-noir, which point towards stylistic, thematic and conceptual differences.

Mannerism, Femme Fatales and Dysfunctional Males in Noir and Neo-Noir From a historical perspective, the development of film noir is often situated within the framework of ‘classical’ Hollywood cinema. Analogously, the term ‘classical noir’ (Spicer 2010: xlvi) has been used to name film noir in its canonical, postwar American period and urban context. However, from a narrative and stylistic viewpoint, film noir is representative of film mannerism, a transitional cinematographic style and mode of representation that deviated from the established forms and norms of classical Hollywood cinema, while providing a more obscure, twisted and realist vision of life and tale (González Requena 2006). Mannerism developed a pronounced formal virtuosity that experimented with camera positions and angles, as well as with innovative lighting techniques: chiaroscuro, low-key visual style, venetian blind lighting and so on. The last is defined by the use of lighting through venetian blinds, whose horizontal slats allow the strategic control of shadows and lights, contributing to mystery and contrast within film noir. The adoption of the protagonist’s point of view is much more insistent than in classical cinema, and ambiguity is constantly reinforced. Accordingly, Schatz (1981: 113) explains that film noir “documented the growing disillusionment with certain traditional American values in the face of complex and often contradictory social, political, scientific, and economic developments”. Furthermore, existentialism and Freudian psychology became fashionable intellectual and literary trends, contributing to the emergence of two archetypal characters: the male psychopath and the femme fatale, “that sultry seductress who preys upon the hero and whose motives and allegiance generally are in doubt until the film’s closing moments” (Schatz 1981: 14). Diverse and dynamic, femme fatales are key characters of the film noir tradition, and their influence resonates across different genres, advertising campaigns and music videos. Jean-Pierre Chartier (Palmer 1994: 9) describes them as ‘particularly terrible’ women, while Krutnik (1991: 63) explains that glamorous femme fatales “tend to be women who seek to advance themselves by manipulating their sexual allure and controlling its value”. Within this ­perspective, Ballinger and Graydon (2007: 4) relate this figure to an intoxicating, beautiful and treacherous female character who is “sexually alluring, linked to the underworld, unreliable and duplicitous in the extreme”. From a feminist approach, Luhr (2012: 31) celebrates femme fatales as empowered and threat-

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

287

ening women who do not depend on “the support or approval of men to define themselves”. They seduce, exploit and then destroy their sexual partners, and their strength also demonstrates the inability of men to dominate them. The femme fatale archetype may be traced back to European proto-noir films such as the tragicomic, late expressionist German film The Blue Angel (1930), where the male protagonist, Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), is humiliated by female lead Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a mesmerising cabaret dancer who drives him to a state of pitifulness and insanity. The concept of masochism (Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch 1991) is useful in approaching the dialectics of sexual difference that are established between the deadly femme fatale figure and their male counterpart, often presented as dysfunctional (submissive, masochist, incapable, obsessed, psychotic, humiliated, etc.). According to Deleuze (1991), there is no masochism without contract or quasi-contract, and the masochistic agreement has the purpose of executing all the desires and orders of Deleuze’s ‘woman torturer’. The protagonists of The Blue Angel materialise their contract through their wedding and marriage certificate, which soon proves peculiar. While Lola looks deified, Rath begins a process of physical and moral decline. He is then forced into a humiliating performance at the Blue Angel cabaret, while his wife furtively kisses another man behind the stage. Rath loses his mental and physical control, and he finally dies in the high school classroom where he was once respected. Inscribed in the canonical American film noir period, Double Indemnity (1944) provides another highly significant representation of the femme fatale (Hirsch 2008: 1–8; Spicer 2010: 77–79). The masochistic relationship between Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is manifested through a metaphor about speed limits and a fetishistic fixation on the femme fatale’s ankles: “I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg”, the protagonist confesses to his boss and mentor. This increasing perturbation intensifies throughout the film because, as Deleuze (1991: 72) explains, fetishism, suspense, delay and rejection are essential elements of the masochistic constellation. The relationship between the woman torturer and the submissive man inverts traditional gender and power roles, as the female protagonist gains authority and the main protagonist becomes a subdued male. Associated with coldness, sentimentality and cruelty, the concept of the woman torturer (Deleuze 1991) is suitable to describe both Lola Lola and Phyllis Dietrichson. They transform the classical female character—as their dedication to their partners becomes a masquerade—and the male characters fail to become classical heroes. Instead, they display masochism: a bond between pain and pleasure, humiliation, submission and fetishism. Like the classical hero, they leave home with the purpose of captivating their object of desire, but their weakness, ambiguity and ambivalence regarding these femme fatales lead to transgression and, finally, to dead-end streets.

288 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

In consonance with changing political contexts and the advancement of women in society, the development of neo-noir since the 1960s has presented a renewed and heterogeneous femme fatale figure. Consider Beat Girl (1960), Eve (1962), and Coffy (1973), which show the range of generational, geographic and cultural differences that fit into the neo-noir femme fatale. The female protagonists maintain the essential psychological traits of femme fatales—they are attractive, seductive and capable of driving men to desperation, misery and, ultimately, death. Nonetheless, their social and economic positions present important differences. Set in London, Beat Girl focuses on the life of a dissatisfied, wealthy teenager, representing youth rebellion and counterculture through style, music and disobedience. Eve is set in Venice, and it tells the story of a French woman who seduces men and takes money from them. As for Coffy, a prime example of African American 1970s ‘blaxploitation’ cinema, it presents a black-and-beautiful heroine and femme fatale (Pam Grier), who seeks revenge for her sister, while fighting against the world of inner-city drug and violence. During the 1960s, a time of profound and convulsive sociocultural and political changes, feminism gained wider public dissemination and acceptance through the so-called second-wave feminism. Sex and the Single Girl (Brown 2003 [1962]) and The Feminine Mystique (Friedan 2001 [1963]) are two important publications that reflected on the changing role of women in society and on their sexuality. Two key aspects should be emphasised: the empowerment of women through increasing access to labour sectors and the idea of sexual freedom, linked to permissiveness towards contraceptive pills, which contributed to a pleasure-oriented conception of sex. These issues play an important role in neo-noir, and they are playfully developed in Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man (1983) and Basic Instinct (1992), two insightful antecedents of Elle (2016). Broadly situated within the context of postfeminism (Lindop 2015), both films feature extremely dangerous and highly eroticised independent women who enjoy economic success and drive male protagonists to obsession and insanity: Christine Haslag (Renée Soutendijk) and Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), respectively. Thus, postfeminism is not only understood as a response to the previous feminist waves but also as a discourse related to a social, economic and political context that is “at least partially constituted through the pervasiveness of neoliberalist ideas” (Gill 2008: 443). Produced in the Netherlands, The Fourth Man is notorious for its erotic, violent and religious overtones, while Basic Instinct, Verhoeven’s best-known work, blurred the boundaries of mainstream Hollywood cinema due to its depiction of sexuality, drugs and violence. Like Lola and Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatales in The Fourth Man and Basic Instinct constitute unattainable objects of desire for dysfunctional males who become victims of their perverse games. Christine Haslag seduces controversial Dutch writer Gerard Reve, an alcoholic, bisexual protagonist who develops the compulsive need to investigate the death of her previous three husbands. As he immerses himself in a love triangle with Christine and her other male lover, he panics on realising that he

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

289

is in real danger of becoming the fourth man to fall, and mystery and ambiguity are emphasised until the end. The femme fatale in Basic Instinct is a successful writer and psychologist who lives in a mansion by the sea. A promiscuous and bisexual blonde, Tramell firmly maintains control in her relationships and openly enjoys sex as an exciting practice associated with pleasure, hedonism and success. Her intimidating power comes from the combination of physical attractiveness, luxurious wealth and specialised knowledge of feelings and situations. She uses this to her advantage when dealing with the male protagonist, Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), a San Francisco homicide detective who investigates her as the suspect of a murder committed during sexual intercourse. Despite multiple warnings, the dysfunctional male becomes addicted to the pleasure and danger associated with the seductress femme fatale, who playfully uses him as a character for her new novel, forcing him to face past traumas. In contrast to ‘classical’ film noirs, neo-noir femme fatales tend to be more emancipated. They display weaker legal bonds with male protagonists, but their psychological and emotional superiority is generally strengthened. The inclusive neo-noir category covers extensive ground, and it hosts a wide variety of themes and styles (Conard 2007; Lindop 2015; Spicer 2007, 2010). Spicer (2010: 215) distinguishes a modernist phase (1967–1980) that attempted to transform generic conventions and a postmodern phase (1981–) in which ‘classical’ noir conventions have been embraced in multiple forms of intensification and engagement. Although the ‘classical’ essence of film noir continues to be cherished in neo-noir, this multiple and contaminated sub-genre favours intense hybridisation, pastiche and typically post-classical voyeuristic experiences. Unlike the ‘original’ creators of film noir, neo-noir authors are fully informed by the historical tradition and have developed a significant degree of self-consciousness and self-referentiality, which favour new mannerisms and twists to thrill audiences. The twenty-first century has brought further extensions of sub-traditions and plots within neo-noir (gangster, robbery, psychological thriller, erotic, science fiction, etc.), as well as a more pronounced tendency to feature female characters as protagonists. In this regard, several French, Spanish, Swedish and German productions should be mentioned: Merci pour le Chocolat (2000), Baise-moi (2000), Lucy (2014); Nobody Will Speak of Us When We’re Dead (1995), Just Walking (2008); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009); and No Place to Go (2000). An American remake of the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was produced in 2011, revealing the way in which European cinema and literature continues to generate new ideas and projects that gain further economic and social impact when appropriated by Hollywood. Moreover, as discussed by Lindop (2015: 2–4), the controversial representation of the neo-noir femme fatale concentrates two differing and dominant interpretations: one that considers them a projection of male fear, desire and paranoia and another one that sees them as a politically effective symbol of women’s empowerment, particularly within postfeminism.

290 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

The collected volume European Film Noir (Spicer 2007) identifies several trends and concerns within distinct national incarnations of noir and neo-noir. For instance, while contemporary French neo-noir is more indebted to polar (police thriller) and political thriller, as well as to an intermittent dystopian strain of tragic, visceral and disorientating hyper-noirs, British neo-noirs extend the crime thriller trend by portraying marginal masculine identities (Spicer 2007: 8–10). It is also useful to think of a transversal, class-based distinction between the twenty-first-century European neo-noirs that focus on upper-­ middle-­class and bourgeois environments and those centred on the underground sphere. The former trend may be initially associated with French New Wave directors such as Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), Godard (Breathless, 1960) and Claude Chabrol (Merci pour le Chocolat, 2000; The Flower of Evil, 2003; The Bridesmaid, 2004; A Girl Cut in Two, 2007), as well as with other recent works like Hidden (Caché) (2005). The underground representation trend, more formally and thematically extreme and explicit, may be associated with contemporary urban thrillers related to crime, sex, violence and drugs (the Pusher series 1996, 2004, 2005; Essex Boys, 2000; Dead Man’s Shoes, 2004; Angels in Fast Motion, 2005), and with transgressive movements like the New French Extremity (Baise-moi, 2000; Demonlover, 2002; Irreversible, 2002; Secret Things, 2002). Elle is broadly situated within the trend of French-based, bourgeois noirs and neo-noirs, but it also participates in and contests rape-and-revenge narratives. Particularly prominent within the noir tradition since the 1980s and 1990s, the rape-and-revenge trend retains a significant presence today, illustrating a representational and ideological link between postmillennial noir and postfeminist discourse (Lindop 2015: 55–58). It is typically presented from the viewpoint of female characters who seek retribution and refuse to tolerate male abuse. It crosses genres (horror, noir, action, etc.), and it includes the aforementioned twenty-first-century neo-noirs Baise-moi, Irreversible, Just Walking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as well as Elle—whose style, social world and narrative path are, nonetheless, unique within the trend. Additionally, Elle shares an intimate yet elusive intertextual relationship with the aforementioned Verhoeven films, and with Huppert’s interpretations in Merci pour le Chocolat, The Piano Teacher (2001), My Mother (2004) and Eva (2018), where she plays unconventional and controversial roles linked to the femme fatale figure. The examination of film noir and neo-noir as a constantly evolving transatlantic tradition, constructed through multiple appropriations and hybridisations, reveals a complex and wide-ranging universe of political and sociocultural contexts, identities and actors. In the twenty-first century, European film noir and neo-noir continues to provoke audiences through the typically mysterious and ambiguous interrogation of the same primary issues, fears and anxieties that nurtured film noir’s origin. As expressed by Spicer (2010: 218), “the ­subject matter and core themes of classic noir—paranoia, alienation, existential fatalism, and Freudian psychopathology—have been retained, but heightened” in contemporary neo-noir through shocking narrative devices, editing and dis-

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

291

ruptive chronologies. The development of twenty-first-century European film noir illustrates collective concerns about “psychological trauma, dysfunctional relationships, existential dread, [and] the lure of money” (Spicer 2010: xlix), as well as about crime, psychopathy, mental, sexual and behavioural disorders. These concerns are deep seated and still resonate today all over Europe and across its borders, as disillusionment, despair, migration, civil unrest, sex and violence continue to dominate the media. However, despite European neo-­ noir’s pronounced stylistic and identity hybridisation, its country-based categorisation prevails (French, British, Spanish, etc.), revealing the persistence of certain national specificities within Europe, which are linked to the plurality of languages, identities and cultural traditions.

Case Study: Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016) Based on the novel Oh … by Philippe Djian (2012), Elle tells the story of a modern, bourgeois, entrepreneur and independent woman, Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert). Premiered at Cannes in May 2016, Elle’s initial credit titles and music set a mysterious, intriguing yet temporarily calm atmosphere, which is brutally interrupted by the sound of glass breaking and an indeterminate screaming. Violence is prominent from the start, capturing the viewer’s attention. The spectator hears more screaming, like moans of pleasure from a man. This precise moment illustrates the bond between violence and sex (see González Requena 2004: 18). The camera takes a prudent distance, allowing viewers to gain visual access from behind the door (See Fig. 16.1). The shot composition is divided into two halves, setting a dual scenario of polarities and contradictions that speaks about the characters’ psyche (more hereafter). The right half is occupied by a dark brown wall that seems to hide something unknown. In the other half, the protagonist lies on the floor. Michèle’s eyes are closed and her body seems inert. Above her lies a heavier

Fig. 16.1  An unknown masked male rapes Elle’s female protagonist, violently interrupting the calm suburban atmosphere of her bourgeois neighbourhood

292 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

man who dresses in black and wears a mask to hide his identity. She has been raped at home by an unknown male aggressor. These leading characters are surrounded by broken glasses and decorative objects, as well as by the protagonist’s underwear. Behind them, an open window gives entrance and exit to Michèle’s house. Throughout the film, the protagonist displays an ambiguous reaction to her rape. Initially, she refuses to call the police because that would revive childhood wounds and media sensationalism—when she was a child, her father committed multiple murders in the midst of an infamous psychotic episode. Furthermore, she does not show any emotion when informing her friends and ex-husband. Far from breaking physically or considering herself a victim, the protagonist starts her own inquiry to find out who her attacker and rapist is. Her cold, calculating and perverse personality pushes her to discursively underestimate the seriousness of the event, while acquiring different weapons (an axe and a pepper-spray) to achieve the security that no man around her is capable of providing. In this regard, she is characterised as a postmodern, self-sufficient woman who does not need anyone to survive—an “active, freely choosing, self-­ reinventing” figure of postfeminism that resembles the “autonomous, calculating, self-regulating subject of neoliberalism” (Gill 2008: 443). Isabelle Huppert sums up these important reformulations by describing Michèle as a “new type of woman”, “a postfeminist character building her own behaviour and space”, which is “the product of that new era” (Verhoeven and Huppert 2016). This original female protagonist simultaneously represents the role of different archetypal characters in the noir tradition: the successful deadly woman who exerts power over multiple men, as she is “overwhelmingly powerful, autonomous and self-determining” (Lindop 2015: 14); the woman-victim, as her rape may be seen as a sign of danger and vulnerability; and the female detective, who investigates her own rapist. Elle appropriates and reformulates notable canonical film noir conventions, and Michèle even wears a camel trench coat, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s now mythical style. Moreover, the search for her rapist is represented through a dark mise-en-scène, an enigmatic female protagonist and dysfunctional male characters. In this process, the viewer travels through threatening streets and frightening night-time storms that function as metaphors for the danger and mystery located within everyday life in contemporary Europe. Michèle is surrounded by several dysfunctional men who adore her, but who may be also destroyed by her. Consider her ex-husband, Richard, a failed writer; at one point, he unsuccessfully tries to capture the attacker and set himself up as the hero. He protectively monitors the surroundings of his ex-wife’s house but, thinking that he may be her attacker, Michèle covers his face with pepper-spray, seriously harming him. Similarly, their son Vincent is represented as an immature and submissive young man whose life revolves around the wishes of his girlfriend, with whom Michèle develops a rivalry. Moreover, Robert—Anna’s husband and Michèle’s lover—is an unscrupulous and persistent man, who is used by the protagonist to obtain pleasure; Anna is Michèle’s

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

293

best friend and associate, so their relationship is both personal and professional. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Michèle develops a perverse and masochistic relationship with her neighbour Patrick, a married Catholic broker who will be ultimately uncovered as the most dysfunctional male in the story. Despite the presence of his wife, Rebecca, Michèle initiates an erotic game with Patrick during a Christmas dinner at her house. She also displays her perverse character in a moment of reunion when she deliberately places a toothpick in the food of her ex-husband’s girlfriend. This scene of subtle aggression is intertextually related with Merci pour le Chocolat and The Piano Teacher. In the former, Huppert’s character places sleeping medication in the hot chocolate she offers her guests. In the latter, her character injures one of her students by introducing broken glass to her coat pocket. In addition, Michèle has a tense and tempestuous relationship with her mother. When she announces her marriage engagement to a much younger man during dinner, Michèle roars with laughter and maliciously says: “How do you manage to be so grotesque?” The Christmas reunion is then dramatically interrupted when Michèle’s mother suffers a stroke that ultimately kills her. Michèle reacts with astonishment, and that night Anna kisses her while they sleep in the same bed. In the meantime, Robert (Anna’s husband) sleeps in the guest bed. Michèle’s relationship with Patrick unfolds in a subsequent scene where, in the midst of strong winds that may announce a blizzard, he goes to her house with the excuse of helping her close the windows. In this furtive encounter, they develop their erotic relationship, but Patrick suddenly apologises and leaves. The sexual tension between these two characters increases as the film progresses. One night, the unknown masked rapist again sneaks into the protagonist’s house, provoking another strikingly violent scene. Actively refusing to be a victim, Michèle defends herself and manages to stop the rapist by sticking scissors in his hand. She then takes off his mask and discovers that it is Patrick, her neighbour. She is stunned, and the extreme weather conditions symbolise the violent and uncontrollable sexual impulses on show, as well as the unexpected discovery. In contrast with the eager desire for vengeance of other European neo-noir femme fatales (Baise-Moi, Just Walking, The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo…), Michèle interrogates Patrick, seeking understanding: “How was it?” “Did you enjoy it?”, she asks him, “Why did you do it?” “It was necessary”, he replies, and immediately leaves. Reinforced through climatic metaphors, the verbalisation of this pathological need for violence highlights the immanent and uncontrollable impulses latent in the suburban, bourgeois territory, unveiling its dark side and hypocrisy. The ambiguous relationship between Michèle and her rapist is articulated through an uncomfortable and disturbing approximation and identification between the victim and the aggressor. Instead of reporting him or avoiding further contact, Michèle accepts the challenge and embraces the game. Along with her son Vincent, she accepts Patrick’s impromptu dinner invitation, and when Vincent falls asleep on the couch, she follows Patrick to the basement,

294 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

where he has installed a new boiler. Again, he exerts violence against her. Trying to reduce the violent attack, she suggests a healthier and less brutal sexual relationship, but he refuses. She then enters a sexually charged sadomasochistic interaction and hits Patrick in the face. At that moment of climax, the protagonist resembles the woman torturer figure facing a masochist male (Deleuze 1991), and the burning boiler metaphorically refers to Patrick’s irrepressible instinctual drives. Masochism and sadism appear inextricably bound, insofar as “a sadist is simultaneously a masochist” (Freud 2018: 26). Both Patrick and Michèle find enjoyment in their brutal encounter and in their role exchange (See Fig. 16.2). The screen shows a close up of Michèle’s face, which increases the feeling of oppression that defines the scene. This suffocating sensation is heightened by the intense and predominant reddish tone, which symbolises passion and heat. Significantly, Michèle has red hair, red lipstick and red nail varnish, as well as a deep-red dress. Her closed eyes, open mouth and expressive facial expression show pleasure, as she has dangerously allowed herself to get carried away by repressed passions and sexual drives. Elle is marked by the opposition of, and interconnection between, two spheres. The most internal one is defined by the repressed instinctual drives that affect multiple characters, mainly Michèle and Patrick. The external one relates to the need to maintain control, and outward appearances, within an apparently calm, upper-middle-class, suburban white neighbourhood. Symbolically announced in the film’s initial scene (Fig.  16.1), this explosive duality between the hidden and the visible, the private and the public, is in synch with the female protagonist’s fragmented and highly individualistic identity. Moreover, the duality may be understood as a representation of distinct agents in the psychic apparatus of the protagonist: her id and her super-ego (Freud 1990). The first one is related to her sexual and aggressive drives, while the second one reflects her personality and how she presents herself publicly.

Fig. 16.2  In Elle, immersed in a sadomasochistic relationship with her rapist, Michèle hugs her attacker while enjoying sexual intercourse on the hot basement’s floor

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

295

Michèle’s instinctual drives are often situated at home or in the obscure basement. The streets are generally lonely, dark and calm, but the storm symbolises the emergence of violent uncontrolled drives. The two opposed spheres become increasingly intermingled during the film’s resolution, as Michèle coldly confesses to Anna her affair with her husband, while extending and confronting her sadomasochistic relationship with her menacing neighbour. The last encounter between the femme fatale protagonist and the dysfunctional male rapist is framed by Michèle’s festive celebration of her company’s latest video game release among friends and co-workers. Patrick kindly offers Michèle a ride home. His contradictory and erratic behaviour as the good neighbour and the brutal rapist reflects dissociative identity disorder. Michèle accepts and, on their way home, she tells Patrick that she is going to report him to the police. This unnecessary warning precipitates Patrick’s masked transformation and, once the protagonist finally enters her house, he sneaks in and tries to rape her. During the attack, Michèle’s son comes in and hits him from behind. After collapsing in Michèle’s arms, Patrick unmasks and dies on the carpet where he once raped the protagonist. Ultimately, his irrepressible and self-destructive impulses drive him to death, metaphorically succumbing to the postfeminist neo-noir deadly woman. When interrogated by the police, Michèle protects her privacy one last time by pretending that she never knew who her rapist was. In this regard, she illustrates existing social distrust and resistance towards police inquiries related to rape, as well as a desire to keep the secret to herself, reclaiming anonymity to avoid media coverage, external discourses and offensive judgements. As part of a necessary emotional reconciliation with her recently deceased mother, Michèle visits her and leaves flowers on her grave. It stands next to her father’s grave, which is marked by handwritten insults such as “monster” and “murderer”. Despite the protagonist’s desire to escape from her paternal and childhood traumas, the psychopath’s shadow associated with her father’s infamous killings chases Michèle until the end. Anna joins Michèle at the cemetery, asking if she can move in with her. She has decided to leave her husband and wants to intensify her close relationship with Michèle, which she values above all. The film’s last shot shows the two friends walking through the cemetery. Michèle is characterised as unfaithful and perverse, while Anna is naïve and understanding. They represent the two poles of female archetypes: the sensual, strong and enigmatic dark lady, and the innocent and motherly nurturing woman (Place 1998: 47). Despite their asymmetric relationship and the film’s open-ending expectations, their final coming together suggests an emphasis on female independence, overcoming and redemption.

Conclusion By tracing a cinematic journey through the noir tradition, this chapter has explored the complexity of the film noir genre, as well as its expansion and reformulation within the neo-noir sub-genre and the changing political and

296 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

sociocultural landscape. The essential characteristics of film noir continue to resonate in neo-noir and other genres, but there have been substantial changes since its canonical period. While the mysterious, edgy and dark aesthetic of the noir tradition seems almost inescapable for both veteran and emerging filmmakers and creators, many twenty-first-century European neo-noirs participate in the currently dominant post-classical mode of representation. Accordingly, they tend to be more explicit in relation to sex and violence, and this increases their distance from the mannerist style of canonical film noir and its codes, limits and often subtler ambiguity. Watching Elle is a thrilling and thought-provoking experience centred around the troubling and shocking subject matter of rape. The film takes viewers through an intriguing, unexpected and uncomfortable path, where deep instinctual drives are violently liberated within the framework of contemporary everyday life, particularly in relation to French bourgeois identity. In contrast with the more straightforward rape-and-revenge narratives consolidated within postfeminism, Elle creates a surprising and disturbing identification between the attacked woman and the dysfunctional male rapist. Yet the carefully crafted and balanced influence of classical film noir in Elle is much more pronounced than that of post-classical innovations and procedures. As a unique example of European neo-noir in the twenty-first century, Elle combines and hybridises narrative and stylistic elements of film noir, psychological thriller and European auteur cinema. One of the film’s most original contributions is found in its multidimensional representation of the protagonist’s life, which illustrates her contemporary lifestyle and fragmented identity, as well as the concern for retaining control over intimacy within a competitive and mediatised fast-paced world. The provocative noir plot develops amidst familiar everyday scenes, where the femme fatale emerges as an independent protagonist surrounded by several dysfunctional males. Michèle is strong and accustomed to exerting control, but she suddenly finds herself in constant danger. Firm, brave and individualistic, she does not allow her lifestyle and professional routine to be altered by any event, not even by such an intimate and traumatic attack. Visually identified with an emblematic European actress like Isabelle Huppert, Michèle’s character represents and encapsulates particular features of noir’s two most archetypal characters: male detectives and femme fatales. She stands out as a new type of woman, not only capable of economic self-­sufficiency but also of maintaining her leading role among family, friends and employees. Michèle’s success, coldness, perverse personality and ambiguous reaction when she discovers her attacker’s identity make her a powerful and challenging representation of the complex and multifaceted twenty-first-century femme fatale. Moreover, Elle’s failure to obtain financial support in the United States, as well as the possibility of co-producing it in Europe, reaffirms the old continent’s historical role and association with cutting-edge and avant-garde cinematographic projects and noirs.

16  ON THE AMBIGUOUS CHARM OF FILM NOIR: ELLE AND THE NEW… 

297

Questions for Group Discussion . Why did Europe play a key role in the original development of film noir? 1 2. In what ways has the representation of femme fatales in neo-noir reflected the advances and repositioning of women in society? 3. Considering film noir’s dark and disillusioned look at society and human relationships, how would you explain its continuous success and consolidation as a unique canonical genre to be reinterpreted? 4. Name two aspects of Elle (2016) that expose its innovative artistic intervention in the noir tradition. 5. Watch Elle and discuss the relationship between the protagonist, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert), and the male characters surrounding her. How is her power represented? When is ambiguity reinforced?

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Ballinger, Alexander, and Danny Graydon. 2007. The Rough Guide to Film Noir. New York: Rough Guides. Borde, Raymond, and Etienne Chaumeton. 2002 [1955]. A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941–1953). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Brown, Helen Gurley. 2003 [1962]. Sex and the Single Girl. New Jersey: Barricade Books. Castañares, Wenceslao. 1995. Géneros realistas en televisión: Los ‘reality shows’. CIC. Cuadernos Información y Comunicación 1: 79–91. Conard, Mark T. 2007. The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism. Coldness and Cruelty. Venus in Furs, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 9–138. New  York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. 1991. Masochism. Coldness and Cruelty. Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books. Djian, Philippe. 2012. Oh…. Paris: Gallimard. Freud, Sigmund. 2018. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Global Grey. ———. 1990. The Ego and the Id. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Friedan, Betty. 2001 [1963]. The Feminine Mystique. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company. García Canclini, Néstor. 2009. Culturas Híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico: Randon House Mondadori. Gill, Rosalind. 2008. Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times. Subjectivity 25 (1): 432–445. González Requena, Jesús. 2006. Clásico, manierista, postclásico: los modos del relato en el cine de Hollywood. Valladolid: Castilla Ediciones. ———. 2004. Escribir la diferencia. Trama & Fondo. Lectura y Teoría del Texto 17: 7–24. Hirsch, Foster. 2008. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

298 

B. GUTIÉRREZ-MARTÍNEZ AND J. PEDRO

Krutnik, Frank. 1991. In a Lonely Street. Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. New  York: Routledge. Lindop, Samantha. 2015. Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Luhr, William. 2012. Film Noir. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Neale, Steve. 2000. Questions of Genre. In Film and Theory. An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, 157–178. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Palmer, R.  Barton. 1994. Hollywood’s Dark Cinema. The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne Publishers. Place, Janey. 1998. Women in Film Noir. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 47–68. London: British Film Institute. Schatz, Thomas. 1981. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Fimmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House. Schrader, Paul. 1996. Notes on Film Noir. In Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 53–63. New Jersey: Limelight Editions. Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth M. Ward. 1992. Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style. New York: The Overlook Press. Spicer, Andrew. 2007. European Film Noir. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2010. Historical Dictionary of Film Noir. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. New York: Cornell University Press. Verhoeven, Paul, and Isabelle Huppert. 2016. Elle Press Conference. Film Society of Lincoln Center. https://bit.ly/2iyaN6T Accessed 16 August 2018.

CHAPTER 17

Dystopia Redux: Science Fiction Cinema and Biopolitics Mariano Paz

Definitions Biopolitics Developed by Michel Foucault, the concept connects politics and the exercise of power with the biological life of individuals. It explores the methods and techniques by which political power, and the institutions through which it is exerted, is concerned with subjecting, controlling, managing, and disciplining individuals (Foucault 1991, 2000, 2008). Dystopia A detailed narrative or descriptive account of a fictional society that is presented as one that is worse than the one in which the text is produced. Dystopias portray negative, pessimistic visions of future or alternative societies. They are closely linked with the idea of utopia: a fictional society that the author intended to appear better than the one in which she is living (Moylan 2000; Sargent 1994). Science Fiction In the classic formula proposed by Darko Suvin (1979), a genre based on the presence of estrangement and cognition as the two pillars that produce  a

M. Paz (*) School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_17

299

300 

M. PAZ

novum. The novum is a social reality that is different to that in which the text has been produced. This imaginary reality is estranged because it introduces new, unfamiliar, or extraordinary elements. It is based on cognition, which means that these novel elements can be explained through logic, reason, or science.

Introduction This chapter provides an overview of the corpus of science fiction (sf) films produced in Europe in the new millennium, with a focus on Western Europe. The study of sf is important for several reasons. Over the past few decades, it has become a ubiquitous popular genre that informs not only cinema but many other forms of visual culture. Moreover, through the portrayal of future, alien, or alternative civilisations, and by imagining utopian and, more likely, dystopian scenarios, sf films are in fact talking about the present (the time of production of a given film). According to Susan Sontag, behind sf films “lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (1967: 221)—although, she cautions, sf films can also serve to allay those anxieties, normalising what is problematic and thus inuring the audience to the fears that are being represented. According to J.P. Telotte (2001: 19), the importance of sf cinema lies in that it “not only provides us with a most appropriate language for talking about a large dimension of technologically inflected postmodern culture, but also because its fundamental themes help us make sense of our culture’s quandaries”. Although sf cinema is dominated globally by American productions, usually in the mode of the blockbuster, there are other ways in which the genre can find expression. This is the case in Europe, where, it will be argued, sf films are less driven by action, adventure, and spectacle than their American counterparts. Instead, they tend to be more speculative and intellectual, even when relying on sophisticated special and visual effects. Although some of these films can also be classified as art cinema, in the long-established auteur tradition, most of them are narrative works that follow conventional visual and narrative styles. Therefore, this chapter proposes that the tendency for European sf is the occupation of a space that lies in between the complexities and challenges of art cinema on the one hand, and spectacle-centred, action-driven cinema on the other. Most of the films discussed in this chapter combine popular and high culture, relying on sf tropes to convey complex stories that are usually, though not always, critical of dominant political discourses and ideologies.

Defining European Sf Analysing genre cinema entails a complication: genres are easy to recognise but difficult to define theoretically. Sf is no exception—if anything, it is more challenging to define, given how often it incorporates tropes from other genres

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

301

such as comedy, adventure, horror, or even the Western. The first step in attempting a definition is to recognise that genres are not fixed and stable categories and are instead subject to change, evolution, and convergence. In the familiar, if controversial, definition proposed by Darko Suvin, sf is a genre based on the presence of two conditions: estrangement and cognition. The former term refers to an effect of distancing, through which the text presents a situation that is removed from the ordinary, everyday reality of the author. Cognition is associated with an intellectual support for estrangement, one that is based on reason and logic. Thus, the non-realistic elements of the story can be explained by logic and reason (if not necessarily by scientific fact: sf films are often at odds with current scientific knowledge). An estranged text means one that is not realistic, but this could include fantasy, horror, and myth. A logical, rational dimension (cognition) is therefore necessary to differentiate sf from other forms of non-naturalistic genres. The combination of estrangement and cognition will result in the presentation of a novum, which for Suvin means “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (1979: 7–8). It should also be noted that sf, by portraying future or fantastic societies, is closely related to utopianism—particularly with the negative version of the utopian imagination, dystopia (Moylan 2000). Dystopia, a fictional society or place where conditions are worse than those experienced in the society in which the text is produced, informs a large number of sf films, which tend to portray negative visions of the future. Utopia, by imagining positive and better futures, can orient political action and promote social change. Dystopia can also achieve this purpose: by speculating about terrible futures, it warns us about the present, showing which current problems (political, technological, economic, environmental, and so on) we should strive to avoid or resolve. Like other genres, sf relies on familiar tropes, conventions, settings, and iconographies. Without intending to be exhaustive or rigid, a general mapping can be made of the themes, novums, and concerns involved in sf—simply for the purpose of organising the discussion. Sf films can represent dystopian futures, alien invasions, mutations of the body, or the creation of artificial bodies and travel in time and outer space.1 After a brief consideration of the emergence of European sf, this chapter explores a variety of films situated in each of these categories. The final section discusses The Lobster (2015) as a case study. A final point to consider is what makes a given film ‘European’. The criteria that defined national cinemas in the previous century (linguistic, economic, social, ideological) have become more flexible and porous. In increasingly multicultural societies, and in a global context of intensified capital flows, it can be difficult to ascertain the nationality of a film. For example, Children of Men (2006), discussed below, was directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, and some of its funding came from US backers. Does this mean Children of

302 

M. PAZ

Men is not European? If we take into account that the film is shot in the UK, is spoken in English, and features English stars such as Clive Owen, Michael Caine, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, it would be difficult to deny that it has, at least partially, a strong European grounding. Ultimately, no variable alone (shooting location, nationality of director or stars, source of funding) can be responsible for ensuring a geographical status. In fact, co-production between several countries has become the norm in the funding of European cinema (Bergfelder 2005; Liz 2016), as the case study in this chapter attests. In addition, online databases, such as Europa Cinemas and Cineuropa, record and monitor European film production. All of the films discussed below are registered as being European in these databases.

The Emergence of European Sf Sf cinema was born in Europe. Only a few years after Louis Lumière’s early films were released another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, made what is arguably the earliest sf film: A Trip to the Moon (1902). The genre would soon be picked up by filmmakers across Europe and the US, with the greatest sf classic of the silent era being Metropolis (1926), a German film that has continued to influence sf cinema. Eventually, sf would be relegated to the margins of cinema production for decades, giving way to the wave of low-budget B-movies dominated by the Hollywood market throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. The situation would change radically from the 1960s onwards. One of the key catalysts of change was the emergence of the American blockbuster film in the 1970s with such works as Jaws (1975) and, in particular, Star Wars (1977). Star Wars (and its sequels) showed that sf could be extremely successful at the box office. But another crucial change was the demonstration that sf films could also be highly sophisticated examples of art cinema, intellectually challenging as well as visually elaborate, adult instead of juvenile. It was mainly (though not exclusively) European filmmakers who showed that sf could become, once again, the object of serious cinema. This trend began in the 1960s with films such as La Jetée (1963), Alphaville (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and Solaris (1971). In the last three decades of the twentieth century, however, European sf experienced another period of crisis, with extremely few releases out of which even fewer were genuinely interesting films. But once again the cycle was to be reversed: since the turn of the century there has been a significant increase in the number of sf productions across Europe. Many of them have been produced in the UK, the country with the most important sf tradition in the continent, but the new millennium has seen a rise in the output of sf cinema even in countries where it had been mostly ignored by cultural producers, such as Italy and Spain. In fact, the numbers are sufficient to speak of a revitalisation, or indeed rebirth, of sf cinema in Europe.

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

303

Brave New Worlds: The Dystopian Imagination and the Future of Europe Imagining future societies is one of the most common exercises of sf. Very rarely are they happy, utopian spaces; mostly they are rather dark and problematic, if not altogether (post-) apocalyptic. Many of the most stimulating films of the period portray a dystopian future concerned with biopolitics. That is to say, they represent totalitarian or authoritarian political regimes built around the social exclusion of some categories of people who are regarded as a threatening Other. The story portrayed in Children of Men takes place in 2027, when the most absolute fertility crisis afflicts the entire planet: no child has been born in the world for almost twenty years. Social order across the globe has collapsed, except in the UK, which has managed to maintain a strong government. The main aim of the British state has become the protection of its borders and the systematic expulsion of the vast numbers of immigrants who have flocked to the country as the rest of the world descends into chaos. Any foreigner is an illegal alien that must be detained and expelled, without due legal process. Since refugees have no rights, they are often subject to extreme police brutality, in some cases leading to summary executions. On ordinary train station platforms, jails have been set up to hold prisoners who wait for the trains that will transport them to deportation centres. Their plight is ignored by the British citizens who pass by, going about their business and daily commutes. Needless to say, refugees have not caused the infertility crisis and are mere scapegoats that help to keep the government in place. Several authors (Chaudhary 2009; Trimble 2011) have read this premise in the light of the biopolitical theory on the state of exception developed by Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005). The state of exception is a space in which legal and constitutional guarantees have been suspended, similar to martial law. Individuals living under this framework can be defined by the term homo sacer (a figure from ancient Roman law). A homo sacer is a person who has been stripped of all political and human rights (i.e. the qualified life of the person who lives in a polis, or city, described by the Greek term bios) and has been reduced to the status of biological, or bare, life (life as a merely biological condition, devoid of any political and social rights, defined by the Greek term zoē). This is what happens to the immigrants in Children of Men: they are detained, imprisoned, and placed at the mercy of unscrupulous members of the police or the military. Despite the estranged plot, the style of the film is informed by realism. The use of long takes, shot from handheld cameras, in some cases imitating documentary footage from a war zone, reinforces the impression of immediacy and verisimilitude (in one scene, as the camera follows the protagonist amidst a fight between the police and political dissidents, the lens gets spattered with blood). The production design avoids any sophisticated, futuristic technology. The protagonist is an anti-hero, a man who reluctantly agrees to help a refugee who turns out to be pregnant and is wanted by both

304 

M. PAZ

government and dissidents to be used for political purposes. Chases and action sequences are carefully choreographed so that they look clumsy and improvised, avoiding the sleek and agile movements of action cinema. Ultimately, the film portrays a society of rampant xenophobia that has decided to isolate itself from the rest of Europe and to bar immigration into the country. The fact that only a few years after its release, the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU) attests to how accurately the sf imagination can capture social concerns and speculate about future trends. A similar focus on borders and migration informs The Coming Days (2010), a German film that combines sf and melodrama. The story begins in 2020, only ten years into the future at the time of the film’s release. The ‘old European Union’ has collapsed under the pressure of African migration, internal violence, and the shortage of fossil fuels. A new, less extended European Union has been created, with new boundaries drawn out (no map of the new EU is seen, but we know that the southern part of the Alps lies already beyond its limits). Fortified walls have been erected to contain migration. The protagonist, Laura, will venture outside, and although this space is not altogether dystopian (Laura’s ex-partner Hans lives self-sufficiently in a cottage), it is one that lacks the protection of an organised state. A moody and slow-paced film, The Coming Days follows the story of an upper-class family in the years leading to 2020. In 2012, a war breaks out in Saudi Arabia as an Islamist group partially succeeds in toppling the monarchy; the US intervenes and the conflict escalates into a new Gulf War. Laura is a postgraduate student writing a thesis on Darwin and living with her sister in a stylish Berlin apartment—a comfortable bourgeois existence financed by her father. As the war intensifies and extends into the east, with Germany invading Turkmenistan in an attempt to secure access to gas resources, the socio-­ economic situation in Europe rapidly deteriorates. Fuel is increasingly scarce (the government has forbidden the use of all motor vehicles on Sundays), there are severe food shortages in supermarkets, and more and more homeless people live in the streets of Berlin. Social violence also escalates, promoted by a terrorist group called Black Storm, which rapidly moves from cyberattacks that disrupt the internet to murdering and bombing civilians. Against this background, the story is focused on relations between Laura and her family, following the conventions of melodrama. Laura’s sister Cecilia is in love with Konstantin, but he is also attracted to Laura. Laura eventually finds a partner in Hans and becomes pregnant, but she loses the unborn child when she is about to give birth. It turns out there is a genetic incompatibility between Laura and Hans, meaning they cannot have children together. Laura decides to leave Hans and later has an affair with Konstantin, which will severely disturb her sister. Visually, the depiction of this near-future world is dotted with a few, carefully administered novelties that convey the idea of estrangement: zeppelins have become widespread again (due to the fuel crisis), electric carts are frequently seen on the street, personal computers and screens have become more sophisticated. All the other elements of the mise-en-scène,

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

305

including costumes, settings, and props are contemporary. In this sense, the film is not too different from Children of Men; indeed, the two share a concern with a geopolitical order defined by refugees, population movement, and social control. Perhaps, the State represented in The Coming Days is not a fully totalitarian one, but it is increasingly concerned with maintaining the status quo (domestic and international) through the use of force. Laura’s lost child can also be read as a metaphor: although a singular example rather than a full-scale fertility crisis, the death of the foetus can be read as a negation of the future.

Close Encounters: Alien Invasions in European Sf Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo is an expert in making the most of very low budgets in a personal and creative approach to sf. His first film, Timecrimes (2007), is an intricate and complex story about time travel (featuring mostly three main characters). His second work, Extraterrestrial (2011), is also an independent film, tackling the trope of the alien invasion on a very modest scale. It follows four ordinary Madrid residents who have remained stranded in the city after it was completely evacuated following the arrival (though not landing) of a number of giant spaceships. Except for a handful of computer-­ generated imagery (CGI) shots in which we see the round ships hovering over the city, nothing else is shown about the aliens. No explanation is offered as to why they have arrived, and ultimately the film is more a comedy about human relations in the face of an extraordinary event. At the same time, it is interesting to note that the aliens are not portrayed as a dangerous or threatening Other. Directed by brothers Marco and Antonio Manetti, the Italian film Wang’s Arrival (2011) is ideologically different. The Italian secret services have captured an alien creature (a short being with a humanoid face, two feet, greyish skin, and a series of tentacles instead of arms). Most of the film is set in a closed interrogation room in which the alien, Mr Wang, is chained to a chair. Curti, an aggressive interrogator, assisted by Gaia, a civilian interpreter, tries to question Wang, who, it turns out, speaks Mandarin Chinese—learnt in advance of his trip to Earth because it is the language with the largest number of native speakers. However, lacking any knowledge of terrestrial geography or demographics, the alien has landed in Rome. Captured by the police and given the name of Wang by the authorities, he claims repeatedly that he has come in peace, but the interrogator suspects he is lying. A second agent, experienced in the use of electrical torture, is brought in. Gaia, a young woman, is dismayed at the sight of Wang being tortured despite his claims of innocence. Taking advantage of a moment in which she is left alone with Wang, she unlocks his manacles and tries to guide him out of the premises. In the very last sequence, however, Gaia discovers that  a full-scale alien invasion is taking place (portrayed in rather unconvincing visual effects) and realises that Wang’s aim was to coordinate the attack from Earth. This plan ultimately makes little sense (given the technological sophistication of the alien weapons, it does not seem Wang’s presence on the ground is necessary) and the visual effects look underdeveloped even by the standards of

306 

M. PAZ

a low-budget independent production. More problematic, however, is the ideological subtext, since the film implies that the secret service agents were right, and that the use of torture would have been justified. The aliens are extremely hostile and, by interfering with the military, the conscientious civilian has provoked the downfall of humanity. A more sophisticated example of alien invasion story, both narrative and visual, is found in Monsters (2010), a British film by Gareth Edwards. Set in a near future in which giant aliens have occupied northern Mexico all the way up to the US border, the film also draws on the conventions of realist representation (shot in real-life locations, with non-professional actors used for all secondary roles), with a measured dose of CGI (remarkably accomplished given the film’s low budget). The aliens have not invaded the planet deliberately but have been accidently brought to Earth in the form of spores that had contaminated a NASA space probe. The spores gave way to alien vegetation and enormous, tentacled creatures that roam the area. Northern Mexico, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, has been isolated and cordoned off in response, displacing millions of people. Although the creatures are not particularly aggressive and lack any technology, they are big and strong and will respond if attacked. The key aim for the US and Mexican authorities is to contain the aliens and prevent them from spreading out of the quarantined zone. Aerial bombing is the main method chosen to keep them under control, although an additional strategy for the US is a massive fortified wall that the government has built along the entire Mexican border. The story follows a photojournalist who finds himself forced to cross the alien-occupied territory in order to escort a woman back into the US. Even a casual viewing of the film would be enough to realise that it is an allegory about migration and military occupation (Combe 2015; Hantke 2016). Indeed, the erection of a giant wall alongside the US-Mexico border would enter mainstream political discourse in the US only a few years after Monsters was released. The film portrays the wall in a critical light. Although Mexicans are only secondary characters in the story, they are consistently shown as ordinary humans struggling to survive in difficult circumstances. At worst, they charge the Americans for transporting them across the occupied zone; often they offer help for nothing in return. At the end of the film, it is revealed that the wall has been breached and the aliens have entered the US. Whatever the right solution for dealing with the creatures is, it is clear that neither the airstrikes nor the border wall has been effective.

More than Human: Technoscience and the Human Body Cyborgs, androids, clones, and mutated humans: all of these are sf creations commonly found in cinema. European sf is no exception. Both Eva (2011) and Ex Machina (2015), for example, explore the risks, and challenges, of creating artificial life in the form of sentient androids whose minds are indistinguishable from human ones. The tone of the two films is very different. Spain’s Eva is

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

307

more of a family drama about a cybernetic engineer (Alex) working on a project to build a child android so perfect that nobody would be able to tell it is not human. Setting himself to the task of programming a child’s mind, he uses Eva, the delightful young daughter of his former lover (Lana, also a renowned engineer) as a model. But as the plot progresses Alex discovers that Eva is already an android, created years ago by Lana. In a discussion while standing on a snow-covered mountain trail, Eva pushes Lana—she does not mean any harm, but Lana slips and falls of a cliff to her death. The authorities decide that this type of robot is too dangerous, and Eva must be destroyed. In a sentimental ending, Alex switches Eva off, completely deleting her memories and personality. Wholly different in tone, British film Ex Machina is a sinister thriller in which Nathan, a monomaniacal digital tech tycoon, has also built an android, a mechanical anthropoid body with the face of a beautiful woman. It is called Ava (another form of Eva or Eve) and it has already achieved a sophisticated degree of consciousness. Nathan brings in Caleb, an expert programmer, into his secluded, state-of-the-art mansion to perform a Turing test on Ava (this will ascertain if Ava can think like a human being). During daily conversations, Caleb grows fond of Ava, who is permanently locked in her own quarters within the mansion, and continuously monitored by Nathan through CCTV cameras. Eventually, Ava will manipulate both men (and kill Nathan) so that she can escape the premises. The film ends with Ava, her body now fully covered in artificial skin, leaving the secluded house and going out into the world. Both Eva and Ex Machina can be considered ethical and ontological explorations of the creation of life and the meaning of being human. The latter film, however, can be further problematised as a patriarchal fable of men objectifying and controlling beautiful women—women who then prove to be untrustworthy and fatally dangerous (even though Nathan is evidently malicious and few viewers would lament his death). But both works are still serious, thoughtful interventions on the debates and the imagination surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics.

The Final Frontier: European Space Travellers If European sf films tend to be modest productions, the most conspicuous exception to this trend is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). The most expensive European film ever made (at the time of writing) at a cost of 150 million dollars (Donadio 2017), Valerian is also a rarity in that it is a space opera: a subgenre of sf featuring space battles, adventures across planets and galaxies, and multiple alien species. Like so many other works produced by EuropaCorp, the powerful French film studio founded by Luc Besson in 1996, Valerian is an English-language film made in France, oriented to the international market. A feast of special effects and CGI visuals, it consists of a succession of spectacular action sequences and chases in fantastic extraterrestrial environments populated by aliens of all shapes and colours, in the tradition of

308 

M. PAZ

the Star Wars and Star Trek series. However, the story is derivative and often trivial. Unlike Besson’s previous English-language sf extravaganza The Fifth Element (1997), Valerian was a major commercial failure.2 At the same time, having been produced by Besson’s own company, Valerian represents a global rarity: an independent blockbuster film. The German-language Swiss film Cargo (2009) is set in a distant future, where the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by climate change and humanity survives crowded together in orbiting space stations, living in very poor conditions. However, a very distant planet has been discovered: Rhea, a natural paradise where those humans who can afford the trip can live in luxury. The protagonist, Laura, is a doctor who embarks on an eight-year trip on the gigantic cargo spaceship Kassandra in order to raise money to eventually move to Rhea. A series of anomalies during the voyage will lead Laura to discover the truth: Rhea is actually a sophisticated digital illusion designed to deceive humanity and generate a vague sense of hope. Some of the Kassandra crew members do not want the truth to get out but, with the help of Samuel, Laura sends a transmission revealing the illusion. They then manage to destroy the antenna used to broadcast the fabricated images of Rhea. Cargo borrows from the narrative, visual, and aural tropes of horror: a small group of people gathered together in a place from which they cannot get out (in this case the Kassandra spaceship), frequent point-of-view shots of dark corridors, eerie music, and jump scares. However, there are no supernatural or monstrous presences, only some evil agents who want to enforce the illusion of Rhea. The film could be interpreted as a warning against the official narratives invented by political and economic powers, or against the dangers posed by media monopolies.

Case Study: The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is a co-production between private and public corporations across several European countries: Film 4 and the BFI from the UK, the Irish Film Board from Ireland, Canal+ from France, the Greek Film Centre from Greece, and the Nederlands Fonds voor de Film from the Netherlands. Lanthimos is a Greek filmmaker, and some members of the crew (co-screenwriter, cinematographer, editor) are his frequent collaborators, also Greek. But if we take into account that the film is mostly in English (with a few short dialogues in French), that it was shot in Ireland, and that the cast includes actors from Ireland, the UK, France, and Greece, this is clearly a Pan-European project. Despite a very modest budget of €4 million, the film features major international stars such as Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and Léa Seydoux. A slow-­ paced, estranged narrative with an open ending, it is far from an overtly commercial production. At the same time, it is a narrative film, with a linear structure and characters who are driven by specific motivations and goals, so it would be inaccurate to describe it as an avant-garde sf work such as Melancholia

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

309

(2011) and Under the Skin (2013). The Lobster was also a financial success, relative to its production costs (The Numbers n.d.). The story is set in an alternative rather than a future society, and although no locations are identified (the film was shot in County Kerry and in Dublin), it could presumably take place in any northern European country. In this world, it is forbidden for adults to be single: they can only live as a couple. Being alone is the ultimate horror: every activity, from shopping to eating to going for a walk should be done in pairs. Masturbation is abhorred. People who are single, even if that is because a partner has suddenly died or left, are detained and taken to a large, luxurious, and secluded hotel. At this Hotel (known only as such), the inmates (referred to as guests) are given forty-five days to find a suitable companion. For those who do not succeed, the outcome is simple, dramatic, and final: they are converted into an animal of their own choosing. This punishment is never contested: in this imaginary world, or novum, characters have accepted and internalised the rules. It is important to mention that the transformation is not an act of magic: although little attention is given to the mechanics of the process, it is clear that it is exclusively a medical (i.e. technoscientific) procedure—to the point that the blood left over after the transformations is donated to hospitals for transfusions. The animals are then released into the vast woods surrounding the Hotel. They are not sentient or talking animals as those found in fables, but ordinary animals. The protagonist is David (Farrell), an architect who lives in the City and is brought to the Hotel because his wife has left him for another man. Finding a new partner will not be easy, not least because in this world relationships are built on the basis of two persons sharing one main, outstanding feature. Thus, a woman who suffers from nosebleeds may only fall in love with a man afflicted by the same issue; a man with a speech impediment, Robert (John C Reilly), will need to look for a partner with the same problem, and so on. David’s defining feature is that he is short-sighted, so only a short-sighted person could be a potential match. Only one alternative is left to anybody who wants to avoid a relationship (while remaining in human form). In the woods, a society of people who have chosen to reject the hegemonic order of the City lives in hiding. They are called the Loners, and their way of life is the opposite to that of the City. But the Loners are no less intolerant and authoritarian: sex, love, affection, kisses, physical contact, and even flirtation are forbidden under penalty of torture and mutilation. Loners can masturbate as much as they like, since this is a solitary activity. But if any of them is injured, or becomes ill, no help will be provided by the group. After a failed attempt at establishing a relationship, David escapes into the woods and joins the Loners. There he meets the Short-Sighted Woman (Weisz), and they eventually fall in love. When their relationship is discovered, the Loner leader (Seydoux) takes the woman to an eye doctor and has her blinded. In response, David and the woman decide to leave and make their way back into the City. Presumably now that they are in love they can be readmitted into ‘civilised’ society. But the one thing that held the relationship together

310 

M. PAZ

(short-­sightedness) has been removed. On their way to the City, they enter a restaurant. The film ends with David in the men’s restroom, standing in front of the mirror as he holds a sharp knife close to his right eye. In her review of the film, Shelby Caldwell writes that the social critique provided does not adhere to the conventions of sf (2018: 138). However, the film is clearly situated within the dystopian tradition of the sf genre. In fact, when early on David is assigned to ‘Room 101’ at the Hotel, we understand that the film is claiming an association with one of the foundational texts of dystopian sf in the twentieth century: George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the book, ‘Room 101’ is the site in which the worst part of the torture and brainwashing procedure to which political dissidents are submitted takes place. But there are stronger reasons to read The Lobster as sf: the most important one is the way in which it carefully presents the interaction of estrangement and cognition in support of a novum. On the one hand, the style draws on a number of techniques derived from cinematic realism: the film is shot in real-life locations, often outdoors and with natural lighting. However, estrangement is subtly though methodically incorporated into the narrative and visual style. The novum includes no futuristic technology, the costumes that actors wear are contemporary and ordinary, and so are the props. The distancing effect that establishes that this is not a realist text is achieved through other means. One of them is the voiceover commentary which explains the social arrangements of this alternative world. But there are other, subtler ways in which the film represents the dialectics between estrangement and cognition. One example is the scene in which Robert is tortured in the Hotel. He has been caught masturbating and must therefore be punished. While the other guests are having breakfast, the waiters and the Hotel manager bring a toaster to Robert’s table and insert his hand into one of the slots. The fact that this happens in an elegant, spacious hotel dining room full of guests, with impeccably dressed waiters, provokes an uncanny effect. The big toaster being set on the table alerts us to the fact that something is out of place. But the scene also reinforces a more abstract concept: the extent to which in this world people have internalised the rules of social order. Robert is a tall, robust person, and his hand is not being forced down by strong men. It is simply an elderly waiter who is doing this, holding Robert’s wrist on his own, and using just one hand. Nobody else attempts to restrain Robert, who could easily stand up and walk away. The hotel manager presses the toaster lever down, and one of the maids (rather than some security agent) stands by, looking at the scene. No other hotel guest, obviously, complains or attempts to help Robert (see Fig. 17.1). The second visual instance of estrangement is subtler: a moment when the Loner leader is having a conversation with two others in the woods. As they sneakily read David’s diary, a Bactrian camel walks by in the background, crossing the screen from right to left (see Fig. 17.2). In the context of a leafy, mossy forest in the west of Ireland, a camel is clearly a mysterious, unexpected presence. Although the shot lasts only a few seconds, it is a good example of how an overall sense of estrangement can be achieved without the need to rely on sophisticated special effects. It is clear the animal was once a human being at

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

311

Fig. 17.1  Robert is subjected to a painful punishment for having masturbated. The Lobster (2015)

Fig. 17.2  A Bactrian camel walks by in the woods as a group of Loners spy on David. The Lobster (2015)

the hotel—one who was not successful at finding a partner. The Bactrian camel is also significant on a symbolical level: the only camel species with two humps, rather than one, is thus associated with the emphasis on pairs that is so essential to the hegemonic worldview being imposed at the hotel (it is also interesting that the loners who are spying on David are three, undermining the dualistic logic). Additionally, the camel also connotes endurance and persistence, and the capacity to resist adverse conditions (which is what David and his lover will have to do).

312 

M. PAZ

If The Lobster is a work of dystopian sf, it could be wondered if there are any specific anxieties that it is attempting to reveal, critique, or denounce. Indeed, the summary provided above shows that the film is allegorical, and thus open to different possible interpretations. By refusing to provide any geographical and temporal indicators, it cannot be easily associated with one specific political or social configuration. Some authors have read it as a critique of contemporary dating practices in the West, mediated by websites and mobile-device apps in which users are matched through algorithms that detect behaviour and personal patterns that people share (Cooper 2016). In an extensive article, Behzat Sharpe (2016) considers the film a national allegory of the Greek sociopolitical context, particularly the 2015 referendum on austerity measures carried out by the Syriza government. The argument holds together by focusing on the fact that characters in the film are also forced to choose between two equally bad alternatives (the authoritarianism of the City or the Loners). But there are almost no references to Greece or Greek culture within the diegesis (expect for a couple of songs and a brief mention of Greek islands as a romantic holiday destination), and any connections with specific political parties or EU institutions cannot be based on textual evidence. Perhaps the concerns expressed in the film are not to be found in specific references to a given nation state or to digital dating practices, but in wider apprehensions about the ways in which society constructs ideas of difference and otherness, and in how it responds to them. It can thus be argued that The Lobster is in line with the themes explored in the previous sections, particularly those related to biopolitics. As Rabinow and Rose (2006: 198) argue, “biopower takes the form of a politics that is fundamentally dependent on the domination, exploitation, expropriation and, in some cases, elimination of the vital existence of some or all subjects over whom it is exercised”. In the political dystopia of The Lobster, the government is an authoritarian regime constructed on the basis of an us/them dichotomy that excludes and, if necessary, eliminates entire categories of subjects. This is not surprising given, as Gregory Claeys notes, “dystopia’s obsession with enemies, and its determination to eliminate them” (2018: 9). In Children of Men and The Coming Days, the enemies are foreigners and immigrants, who are to be detained, imprisoned, or expelled, but most of the films mentioned previously deal with questions of otherness and difference. In The Lobster, we are also presented with a disciplinarian society that punishes those individuals who do not conform to established rules. The inhabitants of the City, duly married, are full political beings, who can be defined through the term bios, free to enjoy the freedoms and comforts of capitalist society (no surprise that they live in a city, or polis). David and the short-sighted woman, like many other characters in the film, have been expelled from the city and deprived of rights, thus reduced to the status of zoē, or bare life. But they may be punished even further, since for this political system bare life seems to be insufficient: human life must be downgraded further by turning it into animal life.

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

313

Conclusion The emergence of the industrial age, and the social changes engendered by the development of science and technology, gave rise to the sf genre. In the twentieth century, drastic economic crises, tragic world wars, and the scale of violence unleashed on civil populations by totalitarian governments contributed to the popularisation of the dystopian imagination. In the twenty-first century, social changes in response to technological development have accelerated, and the danger of a return to the violent ideologies and political practices of the previous century is very much a present threat (in addition to more recent concerns such as climate change and global warming). Perhaps for these reasons (although there may well be others), the twenty-first century has seen a very significant rise in the output of sf films in Europe. Unlike American sf, dominated by Hollywood cinema, European sf films tend to be situated somewhere in the middle of what Mariana Liz (2016) calls the art/mainstream spectrum. This is a tendency rather than a rule, and there are exceptions at both ends, such as the expensive, spectacle-centred Valerian and the experimental, avant-garde Melancholia. Most of the films discussed in this chapter, however, occupy the middle ground: they follow, by and large, the conventions of narrative, mainstream cinema in terms of editing, cinematography, mise-en-scène, and also production and distribution. At the same time, most of these films avoid the tropes of more obviously commercial sf cinema. Although some are particularly accomplished visually (from Children of Men’s elaborate long takes to Monsters’ digital aliens), they are not exclusively driven by spectacle and CGI effects. They contain few, if any, highly choreographed action sequences, and avoid scenes of large-scale explosions and destruction. They also avoid presenting individualistic solutions to collective problems. Even in those stories in which the ending resolves the quest or plight of the hero, the dystopian novum based on totalitarian governments or post-apocalyptic environments remains. It could thus be argued that these films, by refusing to provide easy fictional solutions, are not attempting to allay social fears about totalitarianism, climate change, or other social threats. Thus, the works discussed above articulate some of the concerns and anxieties that are shared by contemporary European societies, as expressed in political, cultural, and social debates. Key among them is the preoccupation with the Other, often in form of a foreign immigrant, but generally as the manifestation of difference—and as such a presence that is menacing and dangerous, and should be contained, controlled, and even eliminated. At the heart of this process lies the question of biopolitics: power directed towards the surveillance, subjection and disciplining of individual bodies, who often need to be coerced into accepting the rules of a given sociopolitical system. Like many other forms of art, but also like other spheres of intellectual and social engagement (such as the media, academia, and NGOs among others), sf films are talking about what is happening in contemporary Europe and speculating about its future.

314 

M. PAZ

Questions for Group Discussion 1. Why has science fiction become such a popular genre? Why could understanding science fiction film be relevant for the study of contemporary culture, media, and cinema? 2. What are the social, political, economic, and cultural concerns expressed in science fiction cinemas produced in the twenty-first century? How are they related to the countries, and regions, in which the films were produced? 3. What are the differences, in your opinion, between European science fiction films and films of the same genre made in the US? Could you compare two of these films? 4. Can you think of a European science fiction film that you know? Write a personal reflection on, or interpretation of, the film. Compare your notes with those of your peers.

Notes 1. These categories are not mutually exclusive but work here simply for ordering a wide gamut of films. 2. The Fifth Element, starring Bruce Willis and produced by EuropaCorp, also sets the record for most expensive French film at the time.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Behzat Sharpe, Kenan. 2016. The Lobster: Debt, Referenda, and False Choices. Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Enquiry, July. https://blindfieldjournal. com/2016/07/01/the-lobster-debt-referenda-and-false-choices/. Bergfelder, Tim. 2005. National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies. Media, Culture & Society 27 (3): 315–331. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443705051746. Cadwell, Shelby. 2018. The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos (Review). Science Fiction Film and Television 11 (1): 136–139. Chaudhary, Zahid R. 2009. Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Camera Obscura 24 (3): 73–109. Claeys, Gregory. 2018. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Combe, Kirk. 2015. Homeland Insecurity: Macho Globalization and Alien Blowback in Monsters. Journal of Popular Culture 48: 1010–1029. https://doi.org/10.1111/ jpcu.12338. Cooper, Sarah. 2016. Narcissus and The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015). Studies in European Cinema 13 (2): 163–176. Donadio, Rachel. 2017. Valerian Is France’s Most Expensive Film Ever. Luc Besson Says ‘Who Cares?’ New York Times, July 19. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/19/movies/luc-besson-valerian-france-most-expensive-film.html.

17  DYSTOPIA REDUX: SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA AND BIOPOLITICS 

315

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. ———. 2000. Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. London: Penguin. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hantke, Steffen. 2016. The State of the State of Emergency: Life under Alien Occupation in Gareth Edwards’ Monsters. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 41 (1): 25–38. Liz, Mariana. 2016. Euro-Visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema. London: Bloomsbury. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. Biopower Today. BioSocieties 1 (2): 195–217. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. The Three Faces of Utopianism. Utopian Studies 5 (1): 1–37. Sontag, Susan. 1967. The Imagination of Disaster. In Against Interpretation and other Essays, 209–225. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. Telotte, J.P. 2001. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Numbers. n.d. The Lobster (2015). Accessed 30 October 2018. https://www.thenumbers.com/movie/Lobster-The#tab=more. Trimble, Sarah. 2011. Maternal Back/Grounds in Children of Men: Notes Toward an Arendtian Biopolitics. Science Fiction Film and Television 4 (2): 249–270.

CHAPTER 18

Spanish Horror Film: Genre, Television and a New Model of Production Vicente Rodríguez Ortega and Rubén Romero Santos

Definitions Horror Film A film that seeks to provoke fear, shock, fright and terror in spectators, causing a physical reaction as the narrative and the successive set pieces unfold. It is an umbrella term that includes many subgenres such as supernatural horror, slasher film, monster film, the horror thriller and science fiction horror. Fanta Terror Concept used in the Spanish context to refer to fantastic and horror films from the late Francoist period (from the mid-1960s to 1975). Fanta Terror is a local expression of the so-called Euro-Horror, recognisable due to its “disproportionate doses of sex and violence” (Pulido 2012: 42). El Otro Cine/The Other Cinema Term given to twenty-first-century Spanish auteur films that have achieved prestige within the international festival circuit but have obtained unremarkable box-office returns. In this regard, it is worth noting directors like Jaime Rosales with films such as The Hours of the Day (2003) or Albert Serra with The

V. Rodríguez Ortega (*) • R. Romero Santos Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_18

317

318 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

Death of Louis XIV (2016) who frequently showcase their works in premiere venues such as high-profile film festivals. Monster Children Horror One of the main characteristics of Spanish cinema is the recurrent presence of children playing different types of monsters in horror films. This has been an ongoing tendency since 1970s with films such as Who Can Kill a Child (1976) and became central in the early 2000s with The Others (2001) and The Orphanage (2007). In the Spanish context, this subgenre mixes horror and melodrama conventions. Telecinco Cinema Founded in 1996, it is the film production company associated with television channel Telecinco, which belongs to the multimedia conglomerate Mediaset. It has produced some of the most remarkable Spanish films (mostly comedies, thrillers and horror) of the last two decades. Examples are The Other Side of the Bed (2002), The Orphanage, Spanish Movie (2009), No Rest for the Wicked (2011), Spanish Affair (2014), Regression (2015) and A Monster Calls (2016).

Introduction This chapter discusses the evolution of Spanish horror film from the 1960s to the present. First, it examines the evolution of horror in the context of film co-­ productions in the 1960s and 1970s, paying special attention to the concept of ‘Fanta Terror’. Second, it studies how genre films and horror, more specifically, evolved throughout the 1980s in the context of the so-called Miró Decree, legislation that favoured auteur films and marginalised generic efforts. Third, it analyses the return of genre in the 1990s through the appearance of a new generation of filmmakers that redefined Spanish film in a clearly transnational fashion. Fourth, it approaches horror film in the twenty-first century, paying special attention to the industrial conditions that enable it, with an emphasis on the key role of television (TV) operators as film production companies. Finally, it studies Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage as a national and international triumph that paved the way for an understanding of contemporary Spanish film within a series of both national and transnational coordinates. This film ultimately points to the very history of Spanish cinema and, simultaneously, signals a series of transnational modes of address, situating the generic fabric of horror at the epicentre of contemporary Spanish film production.

Spanish Horror in the 1960s and 1970s Undoubtedly, horror films are ideal to illustrate the varying contours of Spanish film through history. Their analysis allows us to trace how the national industry entered the realm of global culture during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975)

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

319

and, after its demise, how protectionist measures against other, and more powerful industries (mostly Hollywood), were phased out for the sake of the liberalisation of the film market (Triana-Toribio 2003; Ansola González 2004; Benet 2012; Fernández Meneses 2016). From the late 1990s, TV operators started to occupy a central role in the production of films, a logic that persists today. From the mid-1950s, but especially in the 1960s, the Spanish film industry was boosted via the rise of international co-productions. During the 1960s, the most progressive sectors of the dictatorship launched the so-called Nuevo Cine Español (New Spanish Cinema), an auteurist and metaphorical approach to filmmaking, in an attempt to earn international prestige. However, this tendency fared poorly in terms of box office; Spanish cinemagoers preferred comedies and musicals. Two popular genres—until then, marginal in the Spanish context—did gain immediate notoriety: the Western and the horror film. On the one hand, the Western is typically associated with the output of Italian filmmakers such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci in the Almería región—the so-called Spaghetti Western. On the other, horror was relabelled as ‘Fanta Terror’, an indigenous variation on international themes, aesthetics and commonplaces, with a series of specific features that have been broadly studied by a number of international scholars (Lázaro-Reboll 2012; Olney 2014). Due to a serious financial crisis in the audiovisual sector, the dictatorship ‘unofficially’ allowed filmmakers to shoot two different versions of Fanta Terror films (Ibáñez 2016: 49), one for the national market and the other, with more explicit sex and violence scenes, for the international arena. This nationally specific variation of the horror genre would generate significant revenue for a series of directors, obtaining notable success around Europe. A few examples of this trend are Walpurgis Night (1971) in Germany, Let Sleeping Corpses Die (1974) in the United Kingdom, or Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), a film that, a few years later, was directly quoted, if not plagiarised, in Children of the Corn (1984). In this context, it is essential not to forget the singular and unclassifiable Jesús (Jess) Franco, an “eccentric, unruly, and rebellious” (Lázaro-Reboll and Olney 2018: 2) filmmaker who, under different pseudonyms, would make more than 200 films. Franco’s films would trigger a boom to the point that, between 1968 and 1975, 150 of these films were produced—that is, a third of all Spanish national film production (Lázaro-Reboll 2012: 11). Where Ian Olney has attempted to categorise Fanta Terror, he mainly points out the constant presence of children, an anti-authoritarian ethos and eroticised violence (Olney 2014). In other terms, this type of film may be read as an expression of protest and resistance against the Francoist dictatorship. Decades later, a new generation of filmmakers would reshuffle and semantically alter some of the subgenre’s characteristics in a postmodern fashion. Utilising this framework to analyse twenty-first-century works, a series of questionable ideological interpretations have been attached to several films, which were produced in a radically different historical context. These films are aesthetically indebted to Fanta Terror, but they are produced more than a decade after the dictatorship’s demise and must be interpreted accordingly, taking into account Spain’s early 1990s geopolitical scenario, as this chapter explores later on.

320 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

Spanish Horror in the 1980s and 1990s From the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, Spanish cinema sank precipitously at the domestic box office. Sponsored by the newly elected Socialist government Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the so-called Miró Decree marginalised genre films in favour of auteur efforts in an attempt to build a prestigious cinematic output that could compete in the international markets. Miró’s Decree had a clearly state-interventionist character, indeed: subsidies could reach up to 50% of a film’s total budget. Ibáñez, for example, argues that the decree fundamentally favoured fiction films conceived of in terms of high culture and also auteurist reinterpretations of classical genres such as the comedy or the thriller (2016: 99). At the core of this new legislation, there is a conceptualisation of film as a crucial element in the dissemination of a series of values that depict changing patterns of social behaviour in the early Spanish democratic period and reinterpret the historical past from a progressive perspective (Triana-Toribio 2003; Palacio 2012).1 Or, in other words, the new legislation was aimed at creating a modern Spanish cinema (Ibáñez 2016: 98). In many ways, Miró’s Decree also attempted to foster a robust national industry by supporting quality high-budget films that would help to create a multidimensional industrial complex. However, ultimately, some commentators argue that this legislation brought Spanish cinema to an economic dead end (Ansola González 2004). For others, despite its shortcomings, the new law was a fertile ground that catalysed a rejuvenation of Spanish cinema (Cerdán and Pena 2005). One way or another, box-office figures were devastatingly low, a situation also related to major changes in the Spanish audiovisual landscape, such as the rise of domestic video consumption, and the great investment of US companies in the promotion and distribution of their films. In 1982, there were 36 million spectators for domestic films whereas in 1989, only 6.6 million. Or, in other terms, the market share dropped from 21% to less than 8%.2 Furthermore, despite a series of legislative changes—known as Semprún’s Decree—that tried to favour private investment in the cinema and reduce its dependence on the state, in the early 1990s, this situation did not change. In fact, the market share fell to 7.02% in 1994. As the decade went on, Spanish cinema recuperated, keeping a market share above 10% and sporadically reaching 20% in the 2000s (Heredero 1997; Heredero and Santamarina 2002). The emergence of a generation of young filmmakers in the early 1990s would catalyse this improvement in box-office terms. This has been labelled New Spanish Cinema (Heredero 1998; Ramírez-Arballo 2008). On the one hand, this generation was led by filmmakers who worked within a definite auteurist tradition, like Juanma Bajo Ulloa with films such as Butterfly Wings (1991) or The Dead Mother (1993), or Julio Medem with Cows (1992), The Red Squirrel (1993) and Earth (1996). On the other, a different group of filmmakers pointed elsewhere—that is, to the re-articulation of generic categories, partaking in international trends of filmmaking. Genre films were absolutely pivotal in this process—chiefly comedies, thrillers, and most importantly in this

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

321

context, horror films. Within this trend, it is necessary to point out the key importance of Álex de la Iglesia’s Acción Mutante (1993) and The Day of the Beast (1995), and Alejandro Amenábar’s Thesis (1996). While the above-­ mentioned auteurist filmmakers were critically acclaimed, their films barely made any impact in economic terms. Conversely, de la Iglesia’s and Amenábar’s works were amongst the highest grossing films in the history of Spanish cinema at the time of their release. In this recuperation of the Spanish film industry, it is essential to highlight the appearance of new, private, television operators, ending the public monopoly on the television industry. The Spanish government followed the French deregulation model, giving licenses to two free-to-air channels (Antena 3 and Telecinco) and one pay channel (Canal +). Canal +’s main programming asset was the broadcasting of sports, especially football. However, its main strategy to attract subscribers also included the offering of other exclusive content— mostly cinema—in an attempt to target the specific demographic group that could afford to pay for its service. It is important to point out that before Canal + there were no pay channels in Spain. Spanish audiences, therefore, were not used to paying for the right to access audiovisual content. In this context, the PRISA group (Canal +’s owner) believed that the economic bonanza derived from Spain’s inclusion in the (then) European Economic Community (EEC), investments stemming from European cohesion funds, and a series of privatisations had nurtured the surge of an urban middle class, precisely its target audience (Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos 2017a). Appealing to exclusivity and prestige, Canal + would catalyse the works of a new generation of directors, imitating the logic at work in its French counterpart. Through its film production arm, Sogecine, Canal + fostered a new type of cinema, trying to connect with the urbanite middle class, exactly the kind of audiences they sought to engage in their project (Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos 2017a). The main goal was, in the end, to produce a modern cinema, without leaving behind the auteurist imprint. These new cinematic practices would be thematically and aesthetically different from the model fostered by Miró’s Decree, which was much more conventional and institutional. Thus, it is not surprising that instead of adapting prestigious literary works, this new generation of filmmakers would be instead influenced by comic books, music and other youth cultural expressions. In this regard, it is worth noting that these creators belong to the first generation of filmmakers who grew up watching domestic video, having thus access to lots of both national and ­international genre films. These works would in turn be deeply influential on their cinematic efforts. The Day of the Beast is a paradigmatic example in this regard. As mentioned above, de la Iglesia’s film was one of the highest grossing films in the history of Spanish cinema at the time of its release.3 Drawing from a multi-generic universe already at work in his first effort, the action science fiction comedy Acción Mutante, The Day of the Beast plays with the conventions of the horror genre, combining a multiplicity of media aesthetics—comic books, advertising, music

322 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

videos and genre films—and, although it is indebted to key Spanish directors of earlier decades such as Fernando Fernán Gómez, it fundamentally signals the progressive transnationalisation of cinema in Spain (Buse et al. 2008: 39; Rodríguez Ortega 2014). The Day of the Beast is a true postmodern text, articulated through the combination of multiple and disparate visual and aural regimes that overtly declare its own heterogeneity. Moreover, in terms of marketing and circulation, the film was designed as a blockbuster, an event film that would infiltrate the Spanish mediascape at different levels (Cerdán 2004). It is a multi-generic universe where the horror, thriller and the comedic interact with one another, weaving a multilayered set of discourses that point in diverse directions. A few years later, horror film would become a dominant trend within Spanish cinematic output. In many ways, The Day of the Beast opened the gates for this to happen. To sum up, The Day of the Beast was a huge commercial success and paved the way not only for a new generation of filmmakers but also for the emergence of new audiences and a new concept of Spanish cinema, pointing both towards pre-existing national film traditions and internationally.

Spanish Horror Cinema into the Twenty-First Century As the 1990s carried on, Alejandro Amenábar would embark on the dystopian science fiction thriller Open your Eyes (1997)—later remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky (2001)—another critical and box-office hit and, most importantly, for the context of this chapter, the gothic horror The Others, a Spanish-US co-production starring Nicole Kidman.4 Until today, The Others remains the fourth highest-grossing Spanish film in the history of the domestic box office with €27.2 million and 6.1 million spectators.5 Internationally, the film made US$96.2 million in the US market and US$209.9 million worldwide.6 The very stylistic and economic fabric of The Others brings to the fore the questioning of its nationality. After all, it is a film that, at first sight, bears no mark of its Spanishness. It is an English-language film with a cast of mostly Australian, British and Irish actors. The action takes place in a secluded mansion that could be anywhere, though it is said to be set on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, located between France and the United Kingdom.7 Examining this issue more thoroughly, it can be seen that not only Alejandro Amenábar, but also most of the creative talent behind the camera, is Spanish. Furthermore, it is a co-production in which four main companies participate: Cruise/Wagner Productions (US), Las Producciones del Escorpión (Spanish, it belonged to filmmaker/producer José Luis Cuerda and had also financed Amenábar’s two previous films), Dimension Films (US, owned by Harvey and Bob Weinstein) and Sogecine (Canal + Spain). Therefore, both from a financial and creative standpoint, it is indeed a transnational film co-production. In this regard, one must avoid definitions of national cinemas that follow strict aesthetic or economic criteria. Conversely, national cinemas must be understood as “an interlocking sequence of events, knowledge, practices, rituals, and discourses (…) it

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

323

is an experience not simply of the textual and representational but also of the social and institutional” (Choi 2011: 87). In the contemporary context, it is important to take into account, on the one hand, the key importance of programmes such as Eurimages and MEDIA that specifically foster the collaboration between European states to produce and distribute cinematic artefacts. On the other, European filmmakers and producers negotiate agreements with the strongest global film industry—Hollywood—to deliver their work worldwide. Hence, any definition of a national cinematic output must recognise the necessary transnational dimension of most films, and, especially culturally and economically hybrid co-productions. This type of film allows cultural analysts to explore the intersection between local and global identities (Hoefert de Turegano 2004) and how the representational and the financial interact to deliver culturally diverse works. However, it is also important to remark that frequently “coproduced films must tell stories that offer to European and North American audiences the tales they already want to hear” (Halle 2010: 317) and, often, behind all these economic agreements between multinational partners, there is a homogenising impulse that often marginalises more subversive or innovative productions. Within this scenario, genre films are particularly suitable to travel worldwide since they are structured around a series of aesthetic and narrative devices that, typically, circulate across different geopolitical territories. In addition, while “international alliances such as co-productions facilitate the access to the economic funds needed to carve out a small space in the national and global markets, genre-­ structured stories maximise the effects of these institutional and economic agreements” (Rodríguez Ortega 2015: 256). Today, film markets are more porous than ever from a production, distribution and exhibition standpoint. European production companies and sales agents such as Wild Bunch or MK2 aim at delivering nationally, but fundamentally globally, within and outside Europe through market strategies that mix the prestige pedigree attached to certain filmmakers with generic modes of address that may be read by international audiences. Consequently, any discussion of contemporary Spanish horror needs to engage with the concept of the transnational, “whether it refers to models of cinematic production and distribution attuned to the economic flow of genre production, its transnational reach and consumption, or the texts’ dialogue with transnational horror cultures” (Lázaro-Reboll 2017: 161). In this respect, it is worth mentioning the centrality of horror film in contemporary ­mainstream filmmaking. Although this genre had been part and parcel of the renewal of the industry since the 1970s, the so-called New Hollywood Cinema, with films such as The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975), in the 1990s and early 2000s it reached new heights with box-office-smashing hits such as Scream (1996), The Sixth Sense (1999), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Ring (2002). This situation has not changed at all in the last decade and a half. In other words, once a niche genre designed to appeal to horror film connoisseurs or buffs, in the twenty-first century, horror is fully established as

324 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

a mainstream mode of address with a broad transnational reach. Within this context, as we will see, some of the most successful Spanish films in the international markets have predictably been horror works, since they manage to transcend the specificity of their national idiosyncrasies to appeal to spectators on a global scale. By the end of the twentieth century, the rise of horror in the Spanish market was unstoppable. A paradigmatic instance is the success of Fantastic Factory, which specialised in the production of English-language horror films, in collaboration with the established production house Filmax. This was a singularity within the early twenty-first-century Spanish film panorama, since these companies had not yet established partnerships with any television operators; despite this, they managed to create the most successful franchise in the history of Spanish cinema: [REC], comprised of [REC] (2007), [REC]2 (2009), [REC]3—Genesis (2012) and [REC]4—Apocalypse (2014). Filmax films characteristically mobilise a variety of generic commonplaces, de-emphasising any kind of specific cultural marker that could threaten their universal appeal (Willis 2008, 32; Lázaro-Reboll 2017, 163). In fact, some of the filmmakers working for Fantastic Factory/Filmax such as Jaume Balagueró and other horror film directors have managed to go from the national to the international markets. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, for example, was recruited for the transnational film arena and has made films such as 28 Weeks Later (2007) and Intruders (2011). Balagueró, one of the main forces behind the [REC] franchise, has worked back and forth between the production of Spanish-language and English-­ language films. He directed both Darkness (2002) and Fragile (2002), working with the production resources of Filmax. Later on, he joined forces with another Filmax filmmaker, Paco Plaza, to devise [REC]. To sum up, in the Spanish context, horror films started to re-emerge in the early 1990s as both viable commercial enterprises and critically acclaimed aesthetic efforts that aimed at redefining the limits and contours of Spanish cinema. In the twenty-first century, this trend grew due to major changes in Spanish cinema law, the decisive role of television operators in the production of films and the appearance of pioneering companies such as Fantastic Factory and Filmax.

Case Study: The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007) While, for Canal +, film production was part of its philosophy as a television channel, the rest of the public and private operators were bound to it through legal obligation, due to a late 1990s change in the legislative framework. Since 1999, all private television operators have been legally obliged to invest 5% of their revenues in national audiovisual products. To follow through with this requirement, the three private networks—Antena 3, Telecinco and Canal+— launched their own production companies—namely, Telecinco Cinema, Antena

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

325

3 Films (A3 Media Cine today) and Sogecine—in order to control all stages of their cinematic investments. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Telecinco and Antena 3 were especially significant, since together they garnered 85% of advertising income in the Spanish market, creating a televisual duopoly and, therefore, having the biggest sums to invest. If during the 1990s there was a preponderance of auteurist works in comparison to commercial films, the progressive disappearance of public subsidies and their substitution by private financing would dramatically alter the existing panorama. The production companies associated with these television channels would chiefly follow economic criteria, financing projects that were designed to be successful in both movie theatres and subsequent television broadcasts (for details see Ciller and Palacio 2016). These criteria would trigger the production of genre films, most notably comedies and horror films. Auteur films would become secondary, becoming identified with the label ‘el otro cine/the other cinema’. This type of filmmaking would face major financial issues in terms of production, distribution and exhibition. The international success on the festival circuit of filmmakers such as Isaki Lacuesta, Jaime Rosales and Albert Serra would not boost their careers commercially, with their status largely remaining that of niche directors for very limited audiences. Thus, twenty-first-century Spanish cinema has two clear strands: commercial projects financed by private operators, and auteur films, dependent on shrinking state subsidies. Returning to commercial cinema, not accidentally, Telecinco Cinema would greenlight a variety of projects from Álvaro Augustín, a former Canal+ collaborator. Augustín had worked in the production of Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and would become a key figure in the making of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), a film that combines both Canal +’s prestige auteurist modus operandi and Telecinco’s mainstream approach. The film’s formula is the following: a globally recognised auteur, Guillermo del Toro, a remarkable cast of well-known Spanish actors and a significant budget by Spanish standards (€13.5 million). The film’s success would be noteworthy, earning more than €87 million globally and three Academy Awards out of its six nominations. Guillermo del Toro had started his career with the critically acclaimed vampire film Cronos (1993). Immediately after, he began working in the United States, with mini-major Miramax, on the film Mimic (1997). After a volatile relationship with producer Harvey Weinstein, and del Toro’s failure to obtain final cut privileges, the film tanked at the box office. Following this unproductive English-language effort, del Toro would carry out his first collaboration with Spanish producers, The Devil’s Backbone. Next, the Mexican filmmaker would finally conquer Hollywood with his participation in two established franchises, Blade and Hellboy. In between these two last films, as discussed above, he made perhaps his most acclaimed film up to today, Pan’s Labyrinth, until the more recent success of The Shape of Water (2017). By the mid-2000s, del Toro had established himself both as a genre auteur and a commercially successful filmmaker. It is not surprising that, when del Toro offered Telecinco

326 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

the opportunity to finance the first feature of his protégé—Juan Antonio Bayona—the television channel soon agreed to strike a deal. Hence, The Orphanage came to fruition. The Orphanage is the sixth highest-grossing Spanish film of all time. Number one is the 2014 comedy Spanish Affair; number two is J.A. Bayona’s English-­ language drama The Impossible (2012); number three is the sequel to Spanish Affair, Spanish Affair 2 (2015). As mentioned earlier in the chapter, The Others is number four. Lastly, number five is another J.A.  Bayona work, A Monster Calls, a film also shot in English with an international cast that points again to the transnationalisation of Spanish cinema, more generally, and J.A. Bayona’s career, more specifically. In terms of the global box office, while The Orphanage earned a modest amount in the United States, US$7.1 million, the film fared much better in other international markets, making almost US$79 million dollars worldwide.8 The Spanish trailer of the film makes clear its generic fabric through a series of rapid shots and unambiguous music.9 It also features prominently Belén Rueda, a well-known actress within the domestic market at the time of its release, especially through her appearance in the TVE series Los Serrano (2003–2008) and Periodistas (1998–2002). After a short contextual introduction to place the spectator in the mansion/former orphanage where the action takes place, the trailer reads “Guillermo del Toro presents”. In other words, an established cinematic figure and horror brand, del Toro, is mobilised to exponentially increase the legitimacy of the work of a newcomer—director J.A. Bayona. The rest of the trailer introduces the main plot elements of the film—the life of a little boy is at stake—and once again capitalises on Rueda’s name as one of the main assets of the film. Finally, a series of critics’ quotes— from Time magazine and Variety—endow the film with critical legitimacy. To conclude, the film’s title is displayed onscreen along with its director’s. The international trailer recycles a good part of the Spanish one. However, a series of differences are obvious from the very beginning.10 First, del Toro’s name appears onscreen within the first five seconds; he was, above all, the film’s main ambassador for the international markets, given that this project stemmed from a little known Spanish film production, directed by a debutant director. Second, the festival cycle—it was shown in the Toronto, New York and Cannes Film Festivals—of the film is prominently featured, endowing Bayona’s work with international legitimacy since these events are, undoubtedly, three A-list gatherings from a critical and market viewpoint. Third, an English-language voiceover is added. It contextualises the film as a ‘monster children horror film’ and guides the spectator through a succession of images, giving a series of plot clues. As in the Spanish trailer, critics’ quotes are included. However, instead of being a general appraisal of the film, they specifically anchor the film within the conventions of the horror genre and the kind of thrills it offers. One of them reads: “so tense, you’ll need to calm yourself by saying, it’s only a movie”, Time Magazine. The trailer ends with the film’s title. Unlike in the Spanish version, neither Bayona nor Rueda’s name are mentioned. Their lack of appeal to global

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

327

markets made their presence secondary for the promotional strategies of distribution companies outside Spain. In other words, the film is sold as a pure genre piece, set in a world of continuous frights and thrills, legitimised by a prestigious filmmaker—Guillermo del Toro—whose name acts as a brand for international horror fans. A similar strategy is also at work in the Spanish and international posters of the film. In the Spanish version (see Fig. 18.1), Belén Rueda is the centre of it all, occupying the most prominent position in the image as she holds a baby. Several children’s hands reach to touch her. She is framed against a window, with her body and face lit through a low-key strategy that emphasises the gothic horror character of the film. The international poster (see Fig.  18.2) utilises the same image of Rueda posing with a baby. In this case, a group of almost faceless children are placed behind her, as though they were her followers. Two main differences stand out. First, Belén Rueda’s name is absent. Second, on top of the image, and above the actress and the children’s image, we read “Guillermo del Toro, The Director of Pan’s Labyrinth & Hellboy presents”. In other words, del Toro is the main selling point of a film that also utilises the characteristic low-key visual fabric of horror to anchor the film generically in its promotional campaign. The Orphanage was made at a key juncture in the history of the Spanish film industry in which television operators were obliged by law to invest significant amounts in the film business. There were two main options: spending a huge amount on A-list, expensive, productions or investing less in a greater number of films designed to fill up more programming slots. The latter option would eventually dominate the Spanish film market. In this regard, The Orphanage was clearly designed to reproduce The Others’ success. It had several disadvantages in relation to Amenábar’s film. First, The Others had a higher budget. Second, instead of having Nicole Kidman, the film’s protagonist was Belén Rueda, well known as a television personality and actress but not a proven star on the cinematic circuit, even though she had played a small role in Academy Award winner The Sea Inside (2004). In addition, sharing a gothic horror mode of address and the partial dissolution of temporal and spatial coordinates to give the narrative a universalising appeal, both films partake in an existing tendency in Spanish horror, already at work during the 1970s in films such as Who Can Kill a Child?, and, as mentioned earlier, an approach extensively ­utilised in a number of Filmax productions (Willis 2008). The logic behind this tactic was that this lack of specificity would immediately boost a film’s potential abroad. Encouraged by the excellent box-office results of Pan’s Labyrinth, Telecinco would launch a media blizzard around The Orphanage, with constant commercials on its television channel and the utilisation of the then innovative social network MySpace. The film’s premiere took place on the Festival Internacional de Cinema de Catalunya (Festival de Sitges), the most important showcase of genre films in Europe. In this case, Sitges was relevant due to its focus on genre and also because of its location: both director J.A.  Bayona and production

328 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

Fig. 18.1  The Spanish poster for The Orphanage

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

Fig. 18.2  The international poster for The Orphanage

329

330 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

company Rodar y Rodar were based in neighbouring Barcelona. As stated above, the film ended up being a phenomenal box-office success. In a film industry highly dependent on television operators’ financing, The Orphanage would turn into the successful formula to imitate. Two more Telecinco Cinema productions would define this production model, First, Agora (2009), which despite having 3.4 million viewers and earning €21.3 million domestically, did not entirely fulfil initial expectations11; second, The Oxford Crimes (2008), with 1.4 million viewers and €8.3 million of domestic box office.12 The latter film, due to its ‘cinematic look’, was not particularly suitable for television broadcasting. Consequently, The Orphanage marked a line for risk/profitability—that is, a tight budget, with a technical crew preferably coming from the television world and a series of actors recycled from the national television star system, with a melodramatic, in-your-face tone to engage different audience groups. These would be the key ingredients of some of the most remarkable Spanish film productions from the mid 2000s onwards, or, in other words, a cinema with a dominant national flavour that would chiefly succeed internationally, in the case of horror films, due to the readability of the globally established generic conventions that structure this type of film.

Conclusion After witnessing Canal +’s success with de la Iglesia’s and Amenábar’s works in the mid 1990s, television companies such as Antena 3 and Telecinco “saw a profitable niche in the horror genre since it appeals to contemporary Spanish audiences and it is also relatively easy to distribute internationally” (Rodríguez Ortega and Romero Santos 2017b: 236). From the mid 2000s onwards, this would be the successful formula for the biggest box-office hits in the Spanish market: a genre film (mostly comedies and horror) with a cast composed of television actors, thus recycling the TV star system at work at that particular historical time; tight budgets to maximise profitability; and a media blizzard in promotional terms, via the mobilisation of a series of connected strategies through the different windows available for the two multimedia conglomerates (A3 Media and Mediaset, formerly Antena 3 and Telecinco) that dominate the Spanish mediascape. This has entailed the demise, or at least marginalisation, of more auteurist approaches to filmmaking. If names like Julio Medem and Juanma Bajo Ulloa are hailed as key players in the renovation of Spanish film in the early 1990s, today their films are nothing but an afterthought within the national cinema landscape. While Spanish film was highly dependent on the state in the 1980s, from the beginning of the 2000s, television networks and the multimedia conglomerates that own them would become the unquestionable rulers of national film production. With the rise of television fiction to the global forefront of audiovisual production and the recent appearance of international and national players in the Spanish Video on Demand (VOD) market—Home Box Office (HBO), Netflix, Movistar—many film directors are moving into television. Others, like J.A. Bayona and Amenábar continue mak-

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

331

ing English-language transnational productions. The rise of horror films both as central box-office draws and as critically acclaimed artefacts since the 1990s, and the emergence of directors such as the above-analysed de la Iglesia, Amenábar, Bayona, Balagueró, Plaza and Fresnadillo, have been key to the development of Spanish film in the twenty-first century.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. What were the effects of the Miró Decree in the production of genre films in 1980s Spain? 2. What was the role of Canal+ in the production of Spanish films in the 1990s? 3. Who are two key ‘New Spanish Cinema’ directors in terms of genre films? Why? 4. Why did Spanish TV operators start investing in film production from the late 1990s to early 2000s? 5. What was Guillermo del Toro’s role in the making of The Orphanage (2007)? 6. What formula did The Orphanage try to imitate? What was its main precedent in early 2000s Spanish film? 7. How does the Spanish star system work? 8. What are the most successful genres in Spanish cinema in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Acknowledgements  This chapter was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades del Gobierno de España under Grant “Cine y televisión 1986-1995: modernidad y emergencia de la cultura global” (CSO2016-78354-P).

Notes 1. Spain was a dictatorship for almost forty years, from 1939 to 1975, under the ruling of general Francisco Franco. The so-called Transition to democracy (La Transición) started after Franco’s demise in 1975. On 1 March 1979, the first democratic elections took place. 2. All data about domestic box office in Spain has been taken from the ICAA’s website. Instituto de Cinematografía y Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA) is the Spanish institution in charge of managing national film subsidies. https://www. mecd.gob.es/cultura-mecd/areas-cultura/cine.html. 3. The Day of the Beast had 1.4 million viewers, earning €4.3 million. 4. The Others also won eight Goyas (The Spanish Film Academy awards) including Best Film and Best director, becoming the first English-language film to receive the Best Film Award. 5. Data from ICAA. 6. Data from Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id= others.htm.

332 

V. RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGA AND R. ROMERO SANTOS

7. In fact, the film was shot entirely in Spain. More specifically, shooting took place in Madrid and on a location in Cantabria, a region in the North of the country. 8. Data from Box Office Mojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id= orphanage.htm. 9. See trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qjHkkffOx8. 10. See trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUZQgqxIZ6s. 11. Data from the ICAA: http://infoicaa.mecd.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/ Detalle?Pelicula=18908. 12. Data from the ICAA: http://infoicaa.mecd.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/ Detalle?Pelicula=125106.

References Ansola González, Txomin. 2004. El decreto Miró: una propuesta ambiciosa pero fallida para impulsar el cine español de los 80. Archivos de la Filmoteca 48: 102–121. Benet, Vicente J. 2012. El cine español. Una historia cultural. Barcelona: Paidós. Buse, P., Triana-Toribio, N. and Willis. 2008. A.  The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cerdán, Josetxo. 2004. España, fin de milenio. Sobre El día de la bestia (Álex de la Iglesia, 1995). In La historia a través del cine: transición y consolidación democrática en España, ed. Rafael Ruzaga Ortega, 235–256. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. Cerdán, Josetxo, and Javier Pena. 2005. Variaciones sobre la incertidumbre (1984–2000). In La nueva memoria. Historia(s) del cine español (1939–2000), ed. José Luis Castro de Paz, Julio Pérez Perucha, and Santos Zunzunegui, 254–330. A Coruña: Vía Láctea editorial. Choi, Jung-Bong. 2011. National Cinema: An Anachronistic Delirium? The Journal of Korean Studies 16 (2): 173–192. Ciller, Carmen, and Manuel Palacio. 2016. Producción y desarrollo de proyectos audiovisuales. Madrid: Síntesis. Fernández Meneses, Jara. 2016. Contemporary Spanish Film Policies (1982–2010). Dissertation, University of Kent. Halle, Randall. 2010. Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-orientalism. In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 303–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heredero, Carlos F. 1997. Espejo de miradas. Entrevistas con nuevos directores del cine español. Madrid: Festival de Alcalá de Henares. ———. 1998. 20 nuevos directores del cine español. Alianza Editorial: Madrid. Heredero, Carlos F., and Antonio Santamarina. 2002. Raíces de futuro para el cine español. In Semillas de futuro cine español 1990–2001, ed. Carlos F. Heredero and Antonio Santamarina, 23–85. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio. Hoefert de Turegano, Teresa. 2004. The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction: Spanish Policy in Latin America. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 34 (2): 15–24. Ibáñez, Juan Carlos. 2016. Cine, Television y Cambio Social en España. Madrid: Síntesis. Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. 2012. Spanish Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

18  SPANISH HORROR FILM: GENRE, TELEVISION AND A NEW MODEL… 

333

———. 2017. Generating Fear: From Fantastic Factory (2000–2005) to [REC]I (2007–2014). In Contemporary Spanish Horror, ed. Jordi Marí, 161–189. New York: Routledge. Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, and Ian Olney, eds. 2018. The Films of Jess Franco. Detroit: Wayne University Press. Olney, Ian. 2014. Spanish Horror Cinema. In A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff, 363–389. New York: Wiley & Sons. Palacio, Manuel. 2012. La televisión durante la transición española. Madrid: Cátedra. Pulido, Javier. 2012. La década de oro del cine de terror español (1967–1975). Madrid: T&B editores. Ramírez-Arballo, Alejandro. 2008. El desplante neorromántico de Alex de la Iglesia en el contexto finisecular. Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism 4: 7. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https:// scholar.google.es/&httpsredir=1&article=1112&context=dissidences. Rodríguez Ortega, Vicente. 2014. Clowns, Goats, Music and the Comedic Violent: Late Francoism and the Transition to Democracy in Álex de la Iglesia’s Films. In (Re)viewing Creative Critical and Commercial Practices in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, ed. Duncan Wheeler and Fernando Canet, 235–247. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2015. (In)Visible Co-Productions, Spanish Cinema, the Market and the Media. In Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema, ed. Elena Oliete Aldea, Beatriz Oria, and Juan A.  Tarancón, 247–260. London: Bloomsbury. Rodríguez Ortega, Vicente, and Romero Santos, Rubén. 2017a. Canal + Spain and Live Football Broadcasts: A Whole Different Game. View: A Multi-media E-Journal on the Past and Present of European Television. http://ojs.viewjournal.eu/index. php/view/article/view/JETHC121/270. Rodríguez Ortega, Vicente, and Rubén Romero Santos. 2017b. Blurring Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Spanish Horror TV: The Case of Daniel Calparsoro. In Contemporary Spanish Horror, ed. Jordi Marí, 235–251. New York: Routledge. Triana-Toribio, Triana. 2003. Spanish National Cinema. London: Routledge. Willis, Andrew. 2008. The Fantastic Factory: The Horror Genre and Contemporary Spanish Cinema. In Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre, ed. Jay Beck and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, 27–43. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Index1

A Able-bodied, 51–54, 57, 64–66, 201 Abnormality, 54 Abrahamson, Lenny, 229, 236, 237 Ae Fond Kiss…, 43 Aferim!, 9, 169, 170, 176–182 Agamben, Giorgio, 303 Almodóvar, Pedro, 198 Amenábar, Alejandro, 60, 321, 322, 327, 330, 331 American Cousins, 42, 43 Animation, 194, 203, 232, 234 Antena 3, 321, 324–325, 330 Anthropocentric, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78–80, 83, 84 Art cinema, 35, 152–154, 300, 302 Arthouse films/cinema, 168, 173, 174, 178, 179, 181, 192, 196–199, 203 Attenberg, 9, 208, 209, 215, 217–220 Audience, 4, 9, 16, 18, 19, 21, 27, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 44, 45, 52, 54, 56, 61–63, 74, 75, 85, 96, 99, 101–103, 114, 123, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140–143, 145, 153, 154, 170–182, 188–192, 194–203, 204n1, 208, 210, 212, 214–216, 219, 229, 233, 235, 240, 242, 260, 263–265, 269, 273, 283, 284, 289, 290, 300, 321–323, 325, 330

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 102, 103 Auteur, 5, 6, 8, 9, 92, 129, 131–135, 137, 140, 145, 153–154, 163, 169, 198, 200, 203, 214, 233, 300 Auteurism, 6, 129–146, 153, 158 Authenticity, 55, 56, 74, 80, 100, 151, 152, 155–156, 159, 160, 163, 164 Avatar, 78 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 282, 285 Balibar, Étienne, 115, 116, 253, 257, 260 Balkanisation, 110, 112–115 Bananas!, 78 Banlieue, 58, 59, 200, 201 Baron, Lawrence, 90 Barton, Ruth, 233–235, 237, 239 Bayona, Juan Antonio, 318, 324–331 Begić, Aida, 115, 116 See also Snow Belle Toujours, 8, 131, 135, 137, 139–144 Berlin International Film Festival, 170, 188 Berlin Wall, 1, 21, 264–266 Besson, Luc, 195, 307, 308

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9

335

336 

INDEX

Bhabha, Homi, 42, 46 Bildungsfilm, 274 Biopolitcs, 299–314 Birch-Tree Meadow, The, 89, 90, 94–96, 101–105 Black Wave, 110, 111 Blockbuster film, 302, 308 Bond, James, 195, 196, 198 Bondebjerg, Ib, 2, 75, 190, 208 Brereton, Pat, 72, 239 Brigadoon, 38 Browning, Christopher, 110, 119 Buell, Lawrence, 84 Buick Riviera, 115 C Canal +, 199, 308, 321, 322, 324, 325, 330 Canned Dreams, 78 Cannes International Film Festival, 158, 163, 198, 326 Canning, Laura, 3, 9, 237 Cargo, 10, 308 Carney, John, 234, 236 Catholic church, 233, 235, 237 Children of Men, 301–303, 305, 312, 313 Cinema of normalisation, 114–115 Cinema of self-Balkanisation, 113–115 Cinematic realism, 149–164 Cinema verité, 16, 19, 29, 150, 155 Climate change, 73, 78, 308, 313 Close-up (shot), 27, 57, 59, 63, 98, 99, 180, 294 Cluzet, François, 56, 200 Clydesidism, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41 Cold Prey, 75 Comedy theory incongruity, 52, 61, 263, 268, 269, 271 pattern recognition, 52, 61 release, 52, 61 superiority, 52, 61, 268 Coming Days, The, 304, 305, 312 Coming-of-age film, 270, 273, 274 Coming to terms with the past, 267 See also Vergangenheitsbewältigung Cook, Pam, 92, 132, 135

Co-production, 4, 10, 19, 20, 22, 30, 35, 41, 110, 151, 154, 169, 191, 199, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 233, 251, 283, 302, 318, 319, 322, 323 Council of Europe, 151, 191, 209, 255 Creative Europe, 18, 19, 30 See also MEDIA Crowley, John, 236, 238–242 Cubitt, Sean, 72 Cultural imperialism, 229, 231, 235 Cultural industries, 71, 228, 230, 231 Culture clash comedy, 269 D Dağtekin, Bora, 270, 272–275 Daly, Lance, 235 Day After Tomorrow, The, 78 Day of the Beast, The, 321, 322 Dead Snow, 75 Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, The, 8, 157–163 Decentralisation, 207–222 De la Iglesia, Álex, 321, 330, 331 Del Toro, Guillermo, 325–327 Delbo, Charlotte, 98 Deleuze, Gilles, 237, 250, 259, 260, 287, 294 Dench, Jane, 199 Denmark/Danish cinema, 7, 73, 77, 78, 100, 168, 196, 283 Deterritorialisation, 236, 250, 251 Diaspora diasporic, 7, 9, 20, 23, 42–46, 227–229, 235–237, 240 See also Loshitzky, Yosefa Digital cinema, 192, 210 media, 210, 217 Direct cinema, 150, 155 Disability, 6, 7, 51–66, 200, 202 See also Impairment Distribution, 5, 9, 10, 18, 74, 153, 168, 170, 187–189, 191, 195, 198–200, 202, 203n1, 208–210, 212, 217, 219, 221, 232, 233, 235, 238, 320, 323, 325, 327 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The, 7, 52, 62–66 Doane, Mary Ann, 92, 137

 INDEX 

Documentary autobiographical, 18, 30 European documentary, 15–30 nonfiction, 15–20, 22, 23 online documentary, 18 post-documentary, 18 See also Cinema verité Dogme, 6, 85, 151 Dörrie, Doris, 271, 276 Dubbing, 189, 195, 200 Dysfunctional male, 283, 286–293, 295, 296 Dystopia, 299, 301, 312 E Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, 8, 131, 135, 136, 139, 141, 144 Ecocinema, 69, 71–74, 76, 78–80, 84 Einhorn, Lena, 89, 100 Nina’s Journey, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97–101, 105 El Otro Cine / The Other Cinema, 317–318, 325 Elkington, Trevor, 79, 80 Elsaesser, Thomas, 3, 21, 22, 152, 168, 169, 173, 178, 182, 183n5 Emigration, 9, 235–240, 242, 258, 261 Environmentalism, 7, 73, 83, 84 Eurimages, 151, 191, 194, 196, 323 Eurocentricism, 249–251, 261 Eurodoc, see Creative Europe Europa Cinema Network, 154, 191 Europe/European European Commission, 19, 151, 188–192, 196, 200, 202, 209, 211, 215 European Union (EU), 3, 5, 7, 10n1, 18, 28, 35, 73, 151, 170–172, 175, 176, 189–191, 207–209, 211, 230–232, 255, 304, 312 film policy, 5, 210 heritage, 5, 9, 152, 208 migration, migrant crisis, 1, 6, 15–30 European cinema concept, 1–6 filmmaking, 2, 6, 173, 207–222 identity, 1–10 teaching, 2, 3

337

European Convention on Cinematographic Co-productions, 191, 209, 233 European Documentary Network (EDN), 18–20, 30 European Film Awards, 22, 24 Eva, 10, 306, 307 Everett, Wendy, 3, 5, 6, 152 Ex Machina, 10, 306, 307 Extraterrestrial, 305 Ezra, Elizabeth, 3, 6, 154 F Fanta Terror, 317–319 Fast and the Furious, The, 72 Fellman, Susanna, 77 Feminism/feminist filmmakers, 41, 92, 94–105, 115, 116 film theory, 92, 129, 130, 283 and Holocaust Studies, 94–96 perspective, 93–96, 98–105, 115, 116, 142 See also Women Femme fatale deadly woman, 292 woman torturer, 287, 294 Festival de Sitges, 327 Filmax, 324, 327 Film cartolina, 63–65 Film commissions National film commissions, 210 Regional film commissions, 210 Film noir American, 282, 283, 286, 287 erotic neo-noir, 282, 285 European, 10, 282, 283, 285, 290, 291 neo-noir, 9, 10, 282–284, 286–291, 293, 295, 296 proto-noir, 284, 287 psychological thriller, 10, 282, 284, 289, 296 rape-and-revenge, 290, 296 See also Noir Film offices, 217 regional film offices, 217, 221 Finland/Finnish cinema, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77–80, 283

338 

INDEX

Fire at Sea, 7, 24–29 reception (awards, festivals), 24, 26 See also Rosi, Gianfranco Flashback biographic, 97, 101, 105 posttraumatic, 97, 101, 105 Flynn, Roddy, 233, 236 Follow the Money, 78 Footprint Network, The, 77 For a Woman (Kurys, Diane), 89, 90, 94–97, 105 Force Majeure, 71, 81–84 Forsyth, Bill, 38, 39, 44, 47 Local Hero, 39 Foucault, Michel, 161, 299 Fracoism/Francoist, 317–319 France/French cinema, 16, 19, 35, 89, 97, 101–104, 129, 131, 132, 155, 156, 169, 188, 191, 192, 195, 199–202, 211, 236, 251–259, 261, 283, 307, 308, 322 Freak show, 54 French New Wave, 6, 8, 132, 134, 140, 149–151, 156, 157, 163, 164, 290 Freud, Sigmund, 52, 61, 130, 294 Funding regimes, 235 G Galicia, 57, 65 Galt, Rosalind, 2–4, 18, 21, 150 Germany East, 264–267 Federal Republic of, 265, 276 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 266, 267 West, 263, 265–267, 270 See also Reunification Ghetto, 100, 101, 105 Glavonić, Ognjen, 118 See also Load, The Globalisation, 19, 34, 217, 235, 243, 249, 261, 262, 271 Global warming, 73, 83, 313 Glocalisation, 235, 242 Good Bye, Lenin!, 266 Goulding, Daniel, 111, 118 Greece/Greek cinema, 214, 215

crisis, 207, 208, 215 Weird Wave, 9, 208, 215 Guattari, Felix, 84, 237, 250, 259, 260 Gustafsson, Tommy, 72 H Handicap, 53 Hechter, Michael, 35 Hedling, Erik, 75, 213 Heimatfilm, 263–264, 270, 271 Heritage cinema, 74, 75, 79, 80 film, 59, 74, 76, 228, 234, 239 High school comedy, 272 Hirsch, Joshua, 92, 97, 101, 104 Hirsch, Marianne, 88, 90, 91, 96 Hitler, Adolf, 264, 267–268, 274 Hitler humour, 10, 264, 267–268 Hjort, Mette, 74, 80, 154, 167–171, 175, 182, 212 Holocaust history, 1, 91, 95, 102–104 memory, 87–106 trauma, 87–106 See also Survivor; Women and the Holocaust Homo sacer, 303 Horror film, 9, 75, 105, 175, 234, 285, 286, 290, 309, 317–331 Hoskins, Colin, 191 Humour, 39, 52, 61, 201, 202, 263–274, 276, 277 dark, 71 Hungary/Hungarian cinema, 9, 89, 167, 170, 171, 174–178, 182 Huppert, Isabelle, 283, 290, 292, 293, 296 Elle, 283, 290, 291, 296 Merci pour le chocolat, 290, 293 Piano Teacher, The, 290, 293 Hybridisation, 154, 281–283, 285, 289–291 I Iceland/Icelandic cinema, 7, 73, 77, 81, 188

 INDEX 

Immigration, 7, 10, 81, 240, 251, 254, 255, 272, 304 Impairment, 7, 52–54, 66 See also Disability Inconvenient Truth, An, 78 Instrumentalism, 230 Internationalization, 74, 154 Into Eternity, 78 Iordanova, Dina, 3, 113, 118, 168, 175 Ireland/Irish cinema, 9, 227–242 film, 228–238, 242, 243n8, 322 filmmakers, 9, 229, 236 Irish Film Board (Screen Ireland), 230–233, 238, 308 Italian Neorealism, 6, 8, 26, 134, 149–151 Italy/Italian cinema, 24–26, 89, 120, 155, 192, 194, 195, 200, 211, 283, 302 Ivakhiv, Adrian, 72 Iversen, Gunnar, 75, 79 J Jameson, Fredric, 115, 117 Jelača, Dijana, 113, 114 Jergović, Miljenko, 115 Jewish Germans, 269, 276 Jewish women cinematic representations, 87–106 second-generation, 88, 89, 96, 97, 100 survivors, 89, 90, 92, 93, 99–105 third-generation, 88, 89 Jude, Radu, 169, 178–181 Julien, Isaac, 47, 48 K Kaapa, Pietari, 7, 72, 74, 79, 80, 85 Kailyard, the, 33–34, 36–39, 41 Kazaz, Enver, 123 Kellner, Douglas, 111 Kurys, Diane, For a Woman, 89, 96, 97 Kushner, Tony, 24, 25, 27 Kusturica, Emir, 113, 114 See also Underground

339

L Lampedusa, Italy, 24–26, 28, 29 in Fire at Sea, 24, 25 See also Kushner, Tony Language, 1, 3, 4, 9, 27, 36, 63, 97, 114, 152, 157, 168, 179, 189, 190, 194, 195, 198–201, 211, 235, 264, 269, 270, 282, 283, 285, 291, 300, 305, 307, 308, 322, 324–326, 331, 331n4 Lanthimos, Yorgos, 10, 215, 216, 219, 233, 308–312 Levi, Pavle, 114 Levy, Dani, 268, 269 Lewis, Ingrid, 3, 7, 8, 87, 92, 119, 130 Living and the Dead, The, 111, 120–123 Liz, Mariana, 2, 3, 133, 198, 302, 313 Loach, Ken, 43, 198, 234 Load, The, 118, 123 Lobster, The, 10, 208, 233, 237, 301, 308–312 Long take, 26, 134, 156, 303, 313 Loridan-Ivens, 89, 95, 101, 102 See also Birch-Tree Meadow, The Loshitzky, Yosefa, 6, 20, 21, 23 Lu, Sheldon, 72 LUX Prize, 209 M Man Called Ove, A, 80 Masculinity, 10, 39–40, 47, 60, 71, 237, 275, 283 Masochism, 287, 294 McCrone, David, 36, 41 McDonagh, John Michael, 237, 238, 243n8 McGregor, Ewan, 40, 199 MEDIA, 15, 18–20, 31n1, 191, 194, 198, 203, 219, 238, 323 programme, 31n1, 191, 198, 209, 219, 238 See also Creative Europe Medical model of disability, 53 Memory collective, 4, 88, 105, 266 cultural, 174, 208, 266, 272 gendered, 91, 92 vs. history, 103, 104, 106

340 

INDEX

Memory (cont.) Holocaust (see Holocaust, memory) postmemory, 87, 88, 90, 91, 96, 99, 106 prosthetic, 91 subjectivity of, 103, 104 Men/male canon, 105, 131, 132, 135 gaze, 42, 129–131, 135, 137, 139, 141, 146 perspective, 92, 93, 95, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144 Men of Talvivaara, The, 78 Mercer, Kobena, 47, 48 Mi, Jiayan, 72 Middlebrow films, 8, 178, 189, 192, 198–200 Migration (migrant) in documentary film, 15–30 European migrant crisis, 20, 24, 29, 30 forced, 25, 28 as ‘other,’ 29, 30 voluntary, 25 See also Lampedusa, Italy; Loshitzky, Yosefa Mikkelsen, Mads, 198 Milić, Kristijan, 111, 120–123 See also Living and the Dead, The Minimalism, 152, 153, 160 Miró Decree, 318, 320 Mlakić, Josip, 120 See also Living and the Dead, the Monani, Salma, 72 Monster Children Horror, 318, 326 Monsters, 306, 313 Morvern Callar, 41 Mulvey, Laura, 42, 129–131, 135, 139, 141 Mungiu, Cristian, 150, 154, 157, 159, 162, 163, 174 N Nairn, Tom, 35 Nakache, Olivier, 199–202 Narrative ambiguity, 160 Nasta, Dominique, 150, 152, 163, 178

National, the hybrid national identity, 33 national cinema, 1–5, 9, 34, 35, 70, 74–76, 79, 110–113, 150, 155, 168–171, 173, 175–178, 181, 182, 183n5, 231, 233, 238, 249, 251, 301, 322, 330 national identity, 3, 16, 34, 35, 37, 43, 45, 46, 48, 75, 208, 254, 256, 283 Naturalism, 152, 155, 160 Nazi, 87, 106n1, 112, 120, 138, 264, 267, 268, 272, 274, 276 Neonazism, 272 Neorealism, 6, 8, 26, 134, 149–151, 163, 164, 282 Nestingen, Andrew, 79, 80 New cinema, 149–151, 156, 163 New Spanish Cinema, 319, 320 New Wave cinema, 149, 155, 161, 164 Nina’s Heavenly Delights, 7, 41, 43–47 Nina’s Journey, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97–101, 105 Niskavuori, 74 Noir, 281–297 Nordic countries, 7, 73, 76–78, 212 Normality, 7, 27, 51, 53–54, 66, 258 Normality drama, 7, 51–66 Normality genre, 51 Norway/Norwegian cinema, 73, 75–77, 79, 80 O Occupied, 78 Of Horses and Men, 74 Oliveira, Manoel de, 6, 8, 129–146 Ordinary men, 110, 119–120 Ordinary People, 118, 119 Orientalism, 37, 44, 113 Orphanage, The, 318, 324–330 Orphans, 40 Ostalgie, 264, 266, 267 Östlund, Ruben, 71, 81–83 Other othering, 7, 34 otherness, 5–7, 33–48, 312 Others, The, 318, 322, 326, 327

 INDEX 

P Parallel industries, 167–168, 175 Paraplegic, 55 Paris, 16, 56, 58, 63–65, 141, 255–258, 283 Pavičić, Jurica, 112–114 Periphery, 9, 37, 207, 208, 215, 217, 221 Petrie, Duncan, 21, 37, 39, 74, 154, 167–171, 175, 182 Pioneer, 78 Portugal/Portuguese cinema, 130, 133–145 Post-analogue, 168, 179, 180 Post-communism/post-communist, 3, 154, 169, 170, 174–178, 258 Postfeminism, 288, 289, 292, 296 Post-Yugoslav cinema, 8, 109–124 See also Cinema of normalization; Cinema of self-Balkanisation Pseudo-documentary style, 160 Puiu, Cristi, 8, 155–163, 174, 175 See also Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, The Q Quadriplegic, 53, 56, 60, 66 R Rams, 80 Reading, Anna, 91, 103 Realism, 26, 38, 111, 149–164, 281, 282, 303, 310 Recipes for Disaster, 78 Red Road, 41, 42 Refugee, 15, 24–26, 28–30, 116, 258, 261, 272, 303, 305 Refugee crisis, 202, 268, 270, 276 Remembrance, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97–101, 105 Resource politics, 7, 71, 74, 76–79 Reunification comedy, 264–267, 270 of Germany, 264–267 Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, The, 78 Rivi, Luisa, 3, 4, 154

341

Road movie, 9, 157, 249–261, 265, 266, 269, 270 Rob Roy, 36, 40 Romania/Romanian cinema, 3, 8, 149–164, 167–183, 271, 283 Romanian New Wave aesthetics, 5, 149, 151–153, 155, 156, 158, 163, 164 minimalism, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160 Romantic comedy, 44, 190, 233, 267, 269–270, 273, 275 Rosenstrasse (Von Trotta, Margarethe), 89, 97 Rosi, Gianfranco, 24–30 documentary techniques, 30 See also Fire at Sea Runaway production, 168, 175, 231, 234 Rušinović, Goran, 115 See also Buick Riviera Rust, Stephen, 72 S Sami Blood, 80 Schlepelern, Pelle, 75 Science fiction (Sf), 9, 10, 286, 289, 299–314, 317, 321, 322 Scopophilia, 130, 139 Scotland, 7, 33–48, 197 Scottishness hybrid Scottish identity, 7, 38–39, 41–43, 45, 47 Scottish cinema, 7, 33–48 Scottish film, 35, 38–41, 43 Scottish identity, 7, 35–42, 44, 45 Scottish masculinity, 39–40, 47 Scottish national identity, 37, 45, 46 Sea Inside, The, 7, 52, 56, 57, 59–61, 63, 65, 66, 327 Section 481 tax relief, 231, 232, 235, 238 Semprún’s Decree, 320 Sf, see Science fiction Shooter, 78 Silverman, Kaja, 92, 95, 136 Since Otar Left, 9, 251, 255 Snow, 116

342 

INDEX

Social model of disability, 53, 54 Soila, Tytti, 79 Solum, Ove, 75 Son of Saul, 9, 169, 170, 174, 176–182 Sontag, Susan, 124, 300 Spain, 42, 55, 57, 190, 199, 200, 202, 251, 252, 254, 255, 283, 302, 306, 317–331, 331n1, 331n2, 332n7 Spicer, Andrew, 283, 285–287, 289, 290 State of exception, 303 State support of film, 231 Stereotype(s), 8, 40, 42, 45, 52, 54–55, 58, 61, 62, 65, 113, 134, 137, 140, 143–145, 201, 264 Strange Case of Angelica, The, 8, 131, 135, 137, 139, 141, 144 Straubhaar, Joseph D., 189, 190 Strictly Sinatra, 42 Subjective camera/shots, 94–97, 105, 136, 141 Subtitles, 189, 200 Suck Me Shakespeer, 272–275 Survivor(s) as filmmaker, 102, 105 holocaust memories, 88, 93, 97, 101–105 silence of, 97 testimony (see Testimony) Sustainability, 70, 73 Suvin, Darko, 299, 301 Sweden/Swedish cinema, 7, 73, 77, 79–83, 89, 100, 213 Sy, Omar, 56, 200 T Tartanry, 33, 34, 36–38, 41 Taylor, Bron, 72 Telecinco, 321, 324, 325, 327, 330 Cinema, 318, 325, 330 Television, 4, 10, 22, 39, 43, 52, 63, 78, 98, 118, 122, 168, 169, 174, 175, 177, 190, 192, 199, 201, 203n1, 211, 213–215, 232, 266, 270, 272, 317–331 Testimony, 23, 89, 90, 92, 93 Third Half, The, 88, 89, 93, 94, 105 Toledano, Éric, 199–202

Tomorrow We Move, 89, 90, 94–97, 105 Toni Erdmann, 271 Tracy, Tony, 233, 236 Trainspotting, 40, 199 Transcultural comedy, 10, 264, 269–270 Transnational, 1–5, 8, 9, 20, 21, 35, 41, 42, 72, 76, 154, 167–182, 203n1, 209, 216, 227–242, 249, 251, 282, 283, 318, 322–324, 331 Trauma, 66, 87–106, 136, 234, 235, 289, 291 The Troll Hunter, 76 True-life narrative, 53 Tsangari, Athina Rachel, 215–220 Turkish Germans, 10, 264, 269, 272 U UK/UK cinema, 188, 189, 192, 194–196, 200, 201, 207, 211, 229, 234, 259, 283, 302–304, 308, 322 Underground, 113, 114 Unlikely couple film, 270 Untouchable, 7, 9, 52, 56–62, 66, 189, 199–203 Utopia, 299, 301 V Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, 307 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 267 See also Coming-to-terms with the past Verhoeven, Paul, 283–285, 288, 290–295 Basic Instinct, 284, 285, 288, 289 Elle, 283–285, 288, 291–295 Fourth Man, The, 284, 285, 288, 289 Video-on-Demand (VOD), 188, 191, 192, 200, 210, 211, 330 Voice in film; authorial, 92, 94–96; voice off, 93, 102; voiceover, 26, 63, 92, 94–98, 100, 102, 105, 135, 136, 273, 310, 326 women’s voices, 7, 90, 92, 104, 117, 142 Voyeurism, 130, 137–139

 INDEX 

W Wallengren, Ann-Kristin, 75 Wang’s Arrival, 10, 305 Warrior, the in folk poetry, 117 in post-Yugoslav cinema, 8, 109–124 in Yugoslav-cinema, 110, 118 Watts, Naomi, 199 Wave, The, 76 Weinstein, Harvey, 201, 325 Welcome, 9, 251, 254, 255, 258–261 Welfare society, 74 Wheelchair, 55, 57, 58, 63–66, 202 White Reindeer, 80 Witness/witnessing end of the witness era, 90 vicarious witnessing, 88, 90–92, 96–97, 99, 101, 104–106 Wolf, 80 Women and film filmmakers, 41, 44, 93–105, 115, 116, 217, 219, 220 objectification, 131, 132, 134, 137, 139, 141, 144

representation, 89, 94, 129–146 Women and the Holocaust “food talk”, 102 motherhood, 100–101 self-imposed silence of, 97, 102 victims, 87–89, 92, 105 women’s experiences, 94–96, 98, 101–105, 130 women’s voices, 7, 90, 95, 102, 104, 105 writers, 90, 93, 97 See also Jewish women Wood, Mary, 2–4, 6, 132, 145 Y Yugoslav cinema, 110, 111, 118 See also Black Wave; Post-­ Yugoslav cinema Z Žanic, Ivo, 117 Žižek, Slavoj, 113, 114

343